


Dust From A Distant Sun

by commoncomitatus



Category: The New Legends of Monkey (TV)
Genre: Emotional Conflict, Friendship, Gen, Guilt, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-13 21:36:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 38,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21004541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: Early S1. Monkey has a hard time accepting a world where gods are treated like animals.  The fact that one of his new companions actually lived like one is about as (un)helpful as you might expect.Or: Monkey has a lot to work through.  Sandy... is Sandy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a throwaway line in a completely different fandom, wherein one character described another as his penance -- cue the realisation that Sandy would probably represent this, quite literally, to poor Monkey.
> 
> From there, cue angst. >.>

***

Her eyes are like the last moments of a dying star.

A great world-shaking cataclysm, a burst of clarity so bright it blinds him, and then nothing at all. The world lights up, dazzling and dizzying for a fraction of a second — a fraction of a fraction, if even that — then, in the blink of an eye, it’s gone.

Monkey has seen it happen before, thousands of times. Back in the old world he would fly up to the heavens and watch the stars flare and fade, like their lives and deaths were a spectacle made only for him. He would skim the stratosphere on his cloud and gaze up at the universe, taking in all of its secrets with his perfect, prescient, all-seeing eyes, and believe he truly was a king among gods. He liked to imagine he could see further than anyone else, god or demon or human, that he had seen secrets that no-one — not even the Master — ever had or ever would. He doubted it was really true, but he enjoyed the fantasy just the same.

He has seen things no-one in this so-called ‘new world’ can even imagine. He has watched pieces of the galaxy burn up and break apart, some dying in a blaze of glory while others withered away without a spark. Back then, when the world was old and belonged to him, when he imagined himself a king even among the gods, he would stare up at the stars for hours, watching them fade one by one, and pretend that it was by his command.

Those days are long gone now, and the world won’t let him forget it. Five centuries in a rock have dulled all powers and his senses, even his perfect vision, and he can no longer see as far as he could back then. The sky is a mystery to him now, hazy and vast and never-ending; he feels weak and blind when he looks up at it, and he wonders if this is how humans see everything.

Sandy is not human, he knows, but there is a sightlessness in her that unsettles him just the same. Her pupils respond to the light, blooming so wide that they devour all the colour around them, but they rarely respond to him at all; when he tries to look her in the eye he finds only emptiness and a strange confusion.

She carries his mark on her throat. Livid bruises in the shape of his staff, a remnant from their first meeting, healing slowly. ‘A mark of friendship,’ she calls it, smiling like that makes any kind of sense, like it’s not a mark of _war_, like he didn’t try to _kill_ her, like he didn’t feel her breath _stop_—

Like she doesn’t understand what that means.

He won’t admit that it haunts him. He definitely won’t admit that looking at those bruises makes him feel sick.

They don’t bother her. Why should they bother him?

He knows why. He—

He’s never had a god’s throat under his hands before.

He’s never felt a god’s pulse weaken until it’s almost—

Until _she’s_ almost—

Another breath, another heartbeat, and she would have been. Crushed to death like a spider in the shadows, killed by a stupid, senseless misunderstanding, and Monkey would have ended his first day in this new world as the god-killer they always claimed he was in the old one.

He thought she was a demon.

He thought—

Understandable, to look at her: she _looks_ like a demon.

Not just in the obvious ways. Not just in her height or her posture or the way she wields her weapon like it’s in her blood. Not just the myriad little tics and compulsions that might make a human like Tripitaka think twice about getting too close, the wildness in her eyes and the whiteness of her skin, the way she moves and speaks and acts. It’s the _emptiness_, the distance, the dead stars flickering and fading behind her eyes, extinguished one by one each time she blinks.

She’s not—

He’s never seen anything like that in a god before.

Even in Pigsy, who has seen a lot and lived a lot, who has watched the world burn all around him and still carries its memory like a torch in his chest. There’s pain in him sometimes, and guilt and shame — as there should be, after all he’s done — but always something. The good, the bad, the downright selfish, it doesn’t matter; there’s always _something_. He has never looked into Pigsy’s eyes and found _nothing_.

In Sandy’s, _nothing_ is the best he can hope for.

She is so young. By god standards, even by demon standards, if she really had been one. She is so, so young, and already the world has ripped the soul right out of her. It gave her life then tore it away, leaving nothing inside but dead stars and lost memories. And all the while, Monkey slept, losing his strength and his sight and knowing nothing.

She chatters sometimes, feverish and frenzied, cheerful in the way of someone who doesn’t really understand what cheerfulness is. Idealistic babble, delirious gibberish, the seasick meanderings of a mind that isn’t quite right. She’ll ramble for hours, on and on and on until Monkey wants to scream, and then, like the slamming of a door, she’ll stop completely, all the words gone like she’d never spoken at all, replaced by a silence that lasts not just for hours but for days.

He can’t keep up with her.

He doesn’t _want_ to keep up with her.

He doesn’t understand her.

He doesn’t understand what has happened to the world, that a god can be this way. That a god — like him, or like Pigsy, like the Master or Gwen or Lior or any one of the countless others he knew on Jade Mountain — can be so empty, so lost and confused and distant. That a god, powerful and immortal and perfect, can be brought so easily to her knees, driven down and bent backwards and _strangled_—

“Can’t you cover that up?” he blurts out, sounding more than a little strangled himself.

It takes Sandy a long moment to realise he’s talking to her. She blinks a couple of times, trying and failing to comprehend what he’s saying, then stares at a point approximately two hand-spaces above his head.

“Cover what up?”

“That.” He gestures vaguely at her throat, at her bruises— no, _his_ bruises. “I don’t want to see it.”

Blinking a few more times, she refocuses on the ground at his feet. “Why? It doesn’t hurt.”

_It hurts me,_ he doesn’t say, because that would be stupid.

“It’s ugly,” he says, realising only after it’s out that it sounds just as stupid.

“Oh.” She doesn’t look offended. She doesn’t look like she really understands at all, what he’s saying and why he’s so upset. She looks vacant and disoriented and he can’t figure out whether she’s thinking of a hundred different things or of nothing at all. “Well, I suppose if it bothers you...”

_You bother me,_ he wants to tell her. But he knows what Tripitaka would have to say about that, and so he keeps it to himself.

“It’s an embarrassment,” he mutters instead. “A god carrying around a mark of defeat like that.”

At long last — and it’s a blessing and a curse all at once — she finds his eyes. Hers are unfocused, like a warrior who’s taken a few too many knocks to the head; her pupils are blown for no reason that he can make sense of, and the black void seems to swallow everything around it. He wonders how many graves are drifting in the darkness, unseen and unmourned, how many stars died in there before he ever knew her. He wonders if Tripitaka or Pigsy can see them, or if he still has this, at least, of his old sight.

“Is it?” she asks quietly.

It takes him a moment to remember what he said: an embarrassment. It upsets and angers him that she has to ask, that she doesn’t simply know.

_Of course it’s not,_ he thinks, with unjust spite. _You idiot._

Even in the old days, the proud and powerful days where the gods were all but untouchable, there was never any shame in defeat. A battle fought well was a reward of its own, whichever side might prove the victors. That it was almost always their side who won...

Well, that was just a happy coincidence.

But that was before. Before the demons strangled the world and choked half it to death.

Before _he_—

Monkey closes his eyes, breathes slowly and steadily, meditatively like the Master taught him, and swallows scream after scream.

“Of course it is,” he says to Sandy, forcing himself to be angry. “Don’t you know anything?”

She ducks her head, looking ashamed. “Um.”

Her self-consciousness is a noxious thing, sickly and sour-tasting; it feeds his nausea and makes him have to grit his teeth to keep from losing what little control he still has.

“Just cover it up, will you?” he snaps, yanking off his scarf and tossing it at her. “I don’t want to see it any more.”

She catches the thing easily enough, but flounders in putting it on. Like she’s not sure how it works, the simple act of wrapping a scrap of fabric around her neck. Like no-one ever taught her how to do these things, like she never—

He turns away, disgusted and troubled.

He can’t stand the sight of her. Can’t stand to watch her struggling over something so simple and stupid. He can’t stand any of this, and he has to shut his eyes and block it all out, not wanting to see the way Tripitaka scrambles forward to help, his too-high voice offering gentle instruction, his too-small hands covering Sandy’s with priestly, human patience, helping her and guiding her and showing her what to do. Like she’s a naive, helpless child, not a god at all.

If he hadn’t seen her powers at work in Locke’s prison, he might wonder.

When they’re done, Tripitaka sighs and says, “It’s not really your colour.”

Monkey peeks back, finds Tripitaka looking her up and down while Sandy stares at the ground once more, awkward and shy and viscerally uncomfortable. The monk is definitely right about the colour: she is a pale, wraithlike thing, even on a good day, and the rich dark gold washes out her skin to make her look sickly, like she’s got one foot already in the grave. It does nothing to soothe Monkey’s discomfort, or to banish the unwanted memories of her choking on his staff, but he’s not about to admit that.

Besides, the important part is that the bruises are covered. He can look at her now and not feel so much.

If he’s lucky, that is. If she can keep her mouth shut and keep her sallow skin out of his line of sight.

It still makes him feel sick to see her, and angry and helpless. He doesn’t want to have to look at her at all.

But at least now he _can_, without coming face-to-face with his own reflection.

*

He manages to avoid her until the evening, when they stop to make camp.

They’ve been travelling hard through the day, stopping rarely and briefly, and they’re all sweaty and tired. The nearby river, clean and cool and fresh-flowing, is too much of a temptation for any of them to resist.

Well. For _most_ of them.

Tripitaka — whom Monkey is convinced could happily resist any temptation the world tried to throw at him — sits himself down stubbornly at their chosen campsite and refuses to budge at all.

“Someone has to keep an eye on our things,” he points out, shy but stubborn.

Monkey shrugs his indifference, and doesn’t bother to argue; it’s a fair enough point, and why should he care anyway if the little human doesn’t want to get his feet wet?

Pigsy, meanwhile, fusses and frets like the idiot he is, and leaves his weapon in Tripitaka’s care, ‘just in case’. As if a holy man would ever use such a thing, no matter the danger, no matter the threat.

“Better safe than sorry,” Pigsy says, seemingly oblivious to the fact. “Never know what might be lurking in the shadows, eh?”

Sandy, as usual, is off in her own world. Tugging forlornly at Monkey’s scarf, she looks up at him with those big blown pupils and says, in a small but hopeful voice, “Can I take this off yet?”

Monkey rolls his eyes. “No.”

“I don’t want to get it wet.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to have to look at _that_.” He ignores Tripitaka’s warning sound, a huffy little squeak like a lion cub trying to growl, and glares instead at Sandy. “So keep it on, or stay at camp and guard the monk.”

He doesn’t really expect the ultimatum to work on her. No self-respecting god — hells, no self-respecting human or demon, either — would take kindly to being told what to do, and especially not in such needlessly sharp terms, and he expects pushback. He expects sulking, scowling, even outright defiance, and he can’t deny he would probably deserve it... but, typically vacant, she only sighs and shrugs, shoulders barely even rising, like his authority is a weight too heavy to shuck off.

“If that’s what you want,” she sighs, staring at the ground. “I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

Monkey doesn’t point out that _this_ makes him uncomfortable too. The spineless acquiescence, the refusal to retaliate even when he’s sort of asking for it. She’s like a prey animal who knows it’s been cornered, rolling over and waiting for the worst to be over, going limp and boneless and letting the hungry predator claw her to pieces.

The metaphor makes him feel queasy, makes him painfully aware of the differences between them, in power and in other things as well. It reminds him, too, of how close she came to really being his prey, torn apart and turned to dust.

He knows she can defend herself, and he knows that she’s got some talent. He’s seen her fight, and fight well, and he knows what she’s capable of. But that version of her is very far away right now, and he’s having a hard time holding on to the knowledge that it’s there. This version of her, the one with him now, is looking at the ground and the trees and the water, is looking all around herself with emptiness and confusion in her eyes, like there’s a part of her that’s still in that dank sewer, unable to fathom a bigger world beyond. It is hollow and vacant and lost, and nothing at all like the powerful, passionate god he saw taking down Locke’s guards.

And it only gets worse from there.

At the river, he watches her strip away her cloak and her clothes. She is as clumsy and awkward in this as she was in putting on his scarf, like she’s unused to doing it, or possibly just unused to having to do it in company. She still doesn’t know what it means to be part of a group, he knows, to have more than only herself to talk to, more than just her reflection to see her without her clothes on.

She’s not shy, not in the way she gets sometimes when she speaks, but there’s something a little unsettled in her movements, and her eyes widen when she catches him watching her, like a trapped animal in the path of an oncoming cart. Confusion, hesitation, and something else he doesn’t quite recognise.

For a moment, at least.

Then, as the realisation washes over him like a wave of nausea, he does.

Her body—

He wishes he’d let her take off the scarf. He needs the distraction.

He needs to focus on something present, something tangible and comprehensible. All of a sudden, though it goes against everything he’s felt until now, he wants nothing more than to stare at the wounds he inflicted himself, the ones he remembers, the ones can still feel under his fingers when he flexes them, the tension and release, the catching of her breath, her body bent backwards and bowed and—

Even that, he thinks, would be better than _this_.

A lifetime in a world without gods — her lifetime, in the only world she’s ever known — painted across her body in broad, brutal brush-strokes. She is too thin, much too thin, all jutting bones and impossible angles; covered by her cloak, he mistook it for lankiness, but now he can see it for what it really is: _hunger_, carving the flesh off her bones and leaving only misery behind, twisted and distorted and unbearably thin.

He’s never seen a god who was forced to go without. He’s never seen a god wear the lines of starvation, of privation, of not having enough of anything. She is so skinny his breath stalls, so scrawny his stomach turns. She is so scarred—

She is so _scarred_.

That shouldn’t affect him the way it does. But, like every other part of her, it is _wrong_, it is not _normal_, it—

Scars are not unusual, even in a god. No self-respecting warrior is without a few, hard-won and with a great story behind them; Monkey certainly has his share, and he wears them proudly. But there is a difference, he realises now, between the well-worn brands of combat — victorious or otherwise — and the broken lines of brutality, of animal teeth and claws, of frostbite and fever and infection, of _survival_ in all its ugly shapes and colours.

He recognises some of them, of course. Familiar as he is with combat and violence, most he could identify from a thousand paces. The jagged edge of a knife, the broken entry point of an arrow, serrated and twisted and yanked out the wrong way. Burns, blades, blisters and the like, these he knows as well as his own hand.

But only a few of them came from demons.

Monkey has fought more demons than most other gods combined. He’s certainly fought enough to recognise their style, each one a twisted mirror of another. Whatever else he might have to say about them, they know how to make a blow count. There’s nothing shameful in any of Monkey’s demon-inflicted scars, and the handful of similar wounds he sees on Sandy’s body are as neat and familiar as his own. Normal wounds, gods’ wounds, the kind that come from a life at war with demons. Those, he dismisses, and doesn’t spare a second look.

The others, though...

He knows those too.

He’s seen the way humans fight each other, warring over pride and passion and possessions. He’s seen the way they tear each other down for want of a word, or tear each other apart over scraps.

He’s seen the way they _hurt_ each other.

He’s laughed with the other gods, mocking the weakness of the human condition, their eagerness to throw punches or draw weapons over nothing at all, to carve pieces out of each other for greed or lust or wrath.

He knows what humans do to each other.

To _each other_.

But this...

Sandy is supposed to be a god.

She is supposed to be—

She is supposed to be like _him_.

Something seizes inside of him, pressure bearing down on his throat like the impossible weight of his staff, like the pain of being forced down, forced backwards, forced to stop _breathing_—

“I’m going back to camp,” he croaks.

Sandy blinks at him. Then she blinks at the tree he’s leaning against, like she can’t quite tell which one is her companion. There is no comprehension in her at all, no trace of understanding. She’s standing there like it’s normal, like _she’s_ normal, like there’s nothing wrong, nothing twisted about a god bearing human-made marks, showing them off as if they were ordinary battle scars, as if they were—

As if she really was like him.

“I thought you wanted to bathe,” she’s saying, head cocked with her usual confusion. “It was your idea.”

“I changed my mind,” he mutters. His voice is hoarse, cracking painfully. “The monk needs protecting.”

“Tripitaka’s fine,” Pigsy says, cutting through the excuse with narrowed eyes and a sly grin. “Who knew the great Monkey King would be shy about showing off his underthings?”

“I’m _not_.”

His voice cracks again, though, and he hates that Pigsy sees it so well.

“Uh _huh_.”

Pigsy is nothing like Sandy. When he looks at Monkey, he really looks _at_ him, right into his face and his eyes, piercing and searching and completely, maddeningly normal. He looks at him and into him and through him, and he sees things that Monkey really wishes he wouldn’t. Perceptive and clever, for all his outward appearance to the contrary, he sees and understands far too much. Just like Monkey would expect from a fellow god.

It’s sort of comforting, the familiarity. Unfortunately, at the moment, it’s also inconvenient and very annoying.

Monkey turns away, back towards their camp. “Shut up.”

Behind him, Sandy pipes up, “If you’re leaving, can I take off your scarf?”

Monkey doesn’t know why that makes him angry, but it does. Really, really angry, so much that he doesn’t turn around for fear of what he might do if he sees her again.

“Do what you want,” he snarls, fists balling at his sides. “You’re a grown god, dammit. Think for yourself.”

“Um.” Even without turning back around, he knows she’s frowning. “Okay.”

“Steady on,” Pigsy chides. “You’re the one who made her wear it in the first place.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not going to be here any more. So it doesn’t matter, does it?”

He takes only a moment to steady himself, then storms off, fleeing before he can hear the rustle of fabric, before he can turn around and see his own mistake exposed, a god’s wound, living and livid, mixing with humans and demons and animals.

He can’t think of anything more unnatural, or anything more tragic.

*

He’s shaking by the time he gets back to camp.

Tripitaka, warming his small hands over the fire, raises a curious brow at his return. If he notices Monkey’s distress he doesn’t comment on it, just looks him up and down and says, “That was quick.”

Monkey growls. It doesn’t help that Tripitaka isn’t accusing or interrogating him, that he’s probably just making conversation, no more and no less. In fact, for reasons he can’t fully explain, it almost makes him angrier.

“Changed my mind,” he mutters sourly. “That’s not a crime in this new world, is it?”

Tripitaka chuckles. “Depends who you ask. I’m sure Locke—”

“Locke’s not here,” Monkey interrupts. “We took care of her, remember?” He swallows back another growl, but can’t seem to stifle the tremors in his hands; twitching irritably, he clasps them behind his back, safely out of sight. “Don’t be obtuse, monk.”

“I didn’t realise I was.” He peers at him over the flames, eyes narrowing. “Are you feeling okay?”

Monkey stalks over to the other side of the fire and flops down, kicking up dust and disturbing the flames. He watches them dance and flicker, wavering for a moment then gradually growing still, and he wishes his insides would settle so easily, his temper and his frustration, the nausea he feels when he thinks of Sandy, when he remembers—

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? You’re acting kind of strange.” Tripitaka’s lips lift, not quite a smile but a brush of amusement to soften the worry. “Even by your standards.”

That’s about the worst thing he could say right now, and Monkey lets it show.

“I’m not the one who’s strange,” he grits out, letting his eyes flash with more than just the reflection of the fire. “I’m the only one in this wretched, stinking world who’s _normal_.”

Apparently that gives away more than he thought it would, or else Tripitaka is more observant than Monkey gave him credit for because he grows contrite almost immediately. It’s an odd thing, the look on his face, sort of warm and cool at once, like he’s opening up one part of him while trying to keep another hidden and closed off. Like a big secret, or maybe a few small ones, wrapped up in the illusion of honesty. Like—

Wearily, Monkey finds that he doesn’t care.

“I know it’s a lot,” Tripitaka says, quiet and careful. Monkey recognises his tone; it’s the tone humans often get when speaking to gods, like they don’t know how they should present themselves. “A whole new world, everything changed and different and wrong. Demons everywhere. The gods all gone. I know it’s a lot to adjust to.”

Monkey suspects that his laugh — high and ragged and frenetic — only gives away even more of him.

“I don’t need to ‘adjust’,” he says, failing rather spectacularly to save face. “I’m the Monkey King.”

“You were stuck in that mountain for five hundred years,” Tripitaka reminds him, gentle but pointed; the words lash at Monkey’s back, but he won’t let the little monk see that. “You fell asleep in a world where the gods ruled over everything, and woke up in one where they’re all dead or hiding or—”

“Or worse.”

His voice pitches sharply on ‘worse’, and his mind’s eye floods once more with visions of Sandy’s scarred, scrawny form. He swallows, feeling a mnemonic pulse in his head, an echo of the stabbing pain that wracked him when Tripitaka recited that ridiculous chant, the tightening of the crown all that stopped him from ending the day with a god’s blood on his hands. He stares down at them now, half-blind with the memory of it, and is a little surprised to find them clean and dry and still his own.

Tripitaka, sensing his distress, if perhaps not the cause of it, reaches for him. “Monkey...”

Monkey pulls away, angry and wounded. “I’m going to kill them all,” he rasps. “Every worthless, pus-soaked demon that had a hand in making this world happen.”

His fingers clench against his will, tightening into almost-fists. A quiet reminder that the demons aren’t the only ones with a hand in all this, and a not-so-quiet reminder that he can no longer trust himself to tell a demon from a god in the first place. How is he supposed to know the difference between friends and enemies when they all look the same?

“That’s why you’re here,” Tripitaka says. “I mean, not to kill them all. I’m not... I don’t think a monk should condone that sort of thing.” He sounds strange as he says that, like he’s not really sure. “But to change things, to bring the gods back and remake the world into what it used to be.”

“Easier said than done,” Monkey sighs, with a bitterness he doesn’t bother trying to hide. “We’re not exactly flush with allies, monk, in case you haven’t noticed. The whole stinking world is overrun with demons, and what do we have?” He fights the urge to roll his eyes. “_Those two_.”

Tripitaka frowns, visibly perplexed. “They did well enough against Locke,” he points out. “And they’ve lived in this world. They’ve experienced it, they understand how it works, you know? Maybe they could help you to fill in the blanks—”

“I don’t think so.”

He thinks he’s done a pretty decent job of keeping his horror to himself, but Tripitaka’s raised eyebrow tells a different story. He looks startled, a little bemused, and vaguely affronted.

“Do you have a problem with them?”

Monkey bristles, annoyed by his tone. “I just don’t think they’re particularly reliable historians, you know? One of them lived with a demon, and the other—”

This time, he can’t even try to hide the horror; it shudders through him like a wave, powerful and obvious. Tripitaka, who for all his flaws is a perceptive little human, narrows his eyes; clarity floods their dark depths, blooming out until it touches his face as well.

“—lived _like_ one,” he finishes softly.

“Worse,” Monkey grits out, before he can stop himself; again, the word pitches with pain, and again he is too weak to hide it. “Not even a demon would live like that. They’d sooner die than live in that hell.”

It’s probably true, though he’s never kept a demon alive long enough to ask. Demons build their lives on decadence and luxury, their whole existence bevelled down to a single point of focus: satisfying their every shallow, twisted desire. Even back in the days when theirs was the dying breed, they were prouder than gods.

He should have realised then that she wasn’t one of them, living like that. Should have guessed that there was something off about a demon — even a desperate one — making its home in the filth and squalor of the sewers. He should have put the pieces together the instant he heard, should have realised it wasn’t—

He should have _known_.

As though sensing his thoughts, Tripitaka reaches out, a gentle hand finding purchase on his arm, slender young fingers gripping the seizing, spasming muscle.

“She doesn’t blame you,” he says. “You weren’t the first to mistake her for one.”

Monkey thinks again of her wrecked body, of those hellish human-inflicted scars.

“I know that.” The words taste like acid in his mouth, like the memory of poison or an enchanted blade, like nausea or the threat of a scream. “Dammit, I _know_!”

Tripitaka looks thrown, and more than a little upset. He takes his hand back, frowning. “Monkey...”

“Forget it.” He swallows down the feeling, digs down deep and summons a little of his famed bravado. “It doesn’t matter, it’s not important. It’s not...”

He shakes his head, unable to finish. Tripitaka is still staring at him, and the frown hasn’t left his face.

“Did she say something to you?”

Monkey laughs. A little bitter, perhaps, but honestly, it’s the only reasonable response to that question.

“You really think I can keep track of all the nonsense that comes out of her mouth?”

Tripitaka’s frown flickers at last. Only a little, but it’s enough; the corners of his eyes crinkle with tension, a sure sign that his patience is fraying. “You know what I mean.”

Of course he does. “You mean about what I did to her.”

“Or something else. I don’t know. But you seem really upset, and I don’t—”

“I crushed her _throat_!” His voice cracks; he can’t even get through a sentence without sounding as broken as she was. “I tried to _kill_ her, monk. Hells, if you hadn’t stopped me, we both know I would have. And she...” Another crack, but he doesn’t stop. “She’s just walking around like that’s not a problem. Like it’s okay, like those bruises on her neck are some kind of twisted friendship bracelet.”

Tripitaka is blinking now. Confused, but not in the same way that Sandy gets confused, disoriented and distant; the monk’s confusion has a kind of direction and focus, and unlike her he actually makes an effort to work it through to its logical conclusion.

“You’re upset,” he says, feeling it out very carefully, “because she’s _not_ upset?”

“That would be stupid.”

But maybe he is, a little.

Sandy doesn’t understand the significance of what happened back there, what it means that she might have died under his hands. She can’t fathom how wrong it is for a god to take another god’s life.

But Monkey does.

That’s why he’s here in the first place, isn’t it? That’s why he—

That’s why they put him in the rock. That’s why it all happened.

He wonders what they’d think, Gwen and the others, if they could see him now and taste the bitter irony. Locking him away for killing a god he never even touched, and the instant he’s freed he tries to murder the first god he meets. Fitting, he supposes, that he didn’t become a monster until after they’d punished him for it.

Somehow, he doubts they’d find it very amusing.

He doesn’t, either.

He can still hear the Master’s dying breaths, their echo like a storm howling in his head. When he closes his eyes, he can still see his face, the horror slowly bleeding out into something softer, the pain and grief clouding his deep, wise eyes, the sorrow — _I have failed you_ — slowly ebbing away into quiet, into silence, into a sort of peace.

He doesn’t want to have to see Sandy that way too. He doesn’t want to hear her strangled, laboured breath every time the air goes still, doesn’t want to see the stars dying one by one every time he has to look her in the eye.

He doesn’t even _care_ about her. Why should he fall asleep to the memory of her choking under his hands, her body slack, her throat crushed and strangled and—

He has quite enough nightmares already. It’s not fair that he should take on someone else’s. Especially when she doesn’t seem to care that much about them herself.

He doesn’t understand why she’s not upset.

He doesn’t understand why she can’t _understand_.

Is she really that stupid? Is she really so damaged, so broken? Is she really so wrecked and ruined and wretched that almost dying — almost dying at the hands of another _god_ — isn’t even worth a thought?

And if she is...

If this world really did all that to her...

Isn’t that his fault too?

Ashamed and angry, he turns away.

Away from the monk, away from the conversation. Away from the fire and the quiet little sanctuary it offers.

He looks up at the sky, vast and huge and so far away, and imagines he’s watching the stars dying one by one.

*

He takes first watch that night.

It makes too much sense not to, and not just because he’s the strongest and most talented and thus obviously the best equipped to protect the others.

It makes sense because he knows he’s not going to get any sleep anyway. Not when his head is full of dead stars and dead gods, not when he can’t even look up at the sky without shaking all over.

Besides, there’s no use pretending he’s tired when they all know he’s maddeningly wide-awake. Pigsy, always the one of them with the least patience, snapped at him three separate times during the evening meal for his restlessness, for being too agitated to stay in one place, for refusing to sit down and hold still, for not wanting to look around him and see—

“I suppose,” Sandy sighs, tugging unhappily at his scarf, “you’re going to tell me to sleep in this thing as well?”

Monkey doesn’t look at her. “Get used to it.”

“I don’t like it. It keeps coming undone.”

“That’s because you keep yanking on it. Leave it alone and it’ll be fine.”

He can feel her pouting at him, childish and sullen. “It’s _uncomfortable_.”

There’s a lot he could say about that, if he wanted to. Something about her tattered rags, the scraps of fabric she calls clothes, worn and dirty and as wretched as the rest of her. Something about the Jade Mountain, too, about the fine silks and finer satins that go into scarves like his, so much and so perfect that even the softest and most sensitive gods could wear them with comfort. It’s absurd, he thinks, that someone like her, dressed like that, would whine about his clothes.

He keeps all that to himself, though. Talking about it would mean thinking about it, the Jade Mountain and all its little luxuries lost to time and laid to waste. He’s not sure he has the strength to think about that place — beautiful, decadent, glorious for all its flaws — while he’s stuck in this one, rotted and ragged and raw.

“Go to sleep,” he says instead, clenching his jaw so tightly the words almost don’t make it out. “And stop whining.”

Shaking his head, Tripitaka shuffles over to Sandy’s side and adjusts the scarf for her, unwinding and then wrapping it more securely around her neck, fussing and humming like a harried parent.

“Be patient with him,” he says in an unsubtle stage-whisper. “He’s still adjusting.”

Sandy makes a strange, pained sound. “We all are,” she mumbles. “I don’t feel...”

She stops before she can finish, flinching and looking around like she’s bracing for an unseen attack. Tripitaka lets her go, brow furrowed but otherwise quiet, and moves away to give her some space; it’s the best thing to do, they’ve learned, when she gets agitated for no discernible reason.

Still, even with the safety of distance, it takes her a little while to recover herself. A beat, then two, then she shakes her head like she’s coming out of a dream and lies down in the grass, tense and silent, as if nothing ever happened at all.

Monkey, watching with gritted teeth and trying to swallow down his anger and shame, could hazard a pretty good guess at what she was going to say.

He remembers, with some reluctance, their time together in Locke’s prison. He remembers the way she spoke to him, eyes on the wall and mouth drawn tight, unashamed of her truth but afraid to give it a voice. _I felt safe hiding_, she told him, and he didn’t understand and he didn’t want to ask. He still doesn’t, but he can see it in her a little more clearly now, the fading natural light a better mirror than the dank darkness of a demon’s prison. The words are the same, even if she can’t bring herself to say them here.

She can’t hide any more. The world is huge and vast and endless, the horizon so far away that it might as well be another universe entirely. For someone so used to hiding in small, dark spaces, she must feel desperately afraid out here. She’s probably more scared of all this — the great wide sky, the fresh clean earth, the light, the trees, the space — than she is of the god who almost killed her.

She doesn’t feel safe. That’s what she doesn’t say. She doesn’t feel safe out here in this vast new world, this fractured universe made of space and light and emptiness.

Monkey wishes he didn’t know that feeling as well as he does.

He sets himself apart from the others — from her especially, but really from all of them — and he circles the fire and tries not to think too much, distancing himself from them as best he can while they settle down to sleep. He doesn’t want to have to listen to Pigsy’s snoring or the way Tripitaka talks in his sleep, and he really, _really_ doesn’t want to have to imagine whatever hell Sandy sees in her sleep. He doesn’t want to have to sit there and listen as she—

Well.

She heard his nightmares in Locke’s prison.

He doesn’t want to have to return the favour here.

He doesn’t want to see her twitching or hear her moaning. He doesn’t want to have to acquaint himself with whatever secret horrors lurk inside her head, so different from the ones she saw in him back there. Dreams are supposed to be private, personal things, but there’s no privacy in a prison, or a camp full of almost-strangers who think they’re friends.

He’s not sure how he knows that it will happen tonight, but he does. As surely as he knows that he is hiding from his own nightmares, he knows that he will have to share hers.

And he does. And he hates that he knew it.

Maybe it’s the tension in her body that gives her away, anxious and edgy as she drifts off into sleep, or maybe it’s just the fact that she drifts of in the first place. Sandy sleeps like a cat, half awake at all times with one eye open, poised to jump up at the slightest sound, the slightest motion, the slightest shift in the air. They haven’t known each other for very long, but Monkey is pretty sure he’s never seen her sleep deeply or immersively enough to dream.

That sort of hypervigilance can’t last, though. Monkey knows that better than most; everyone has to sleep properly once in a while, and everyone has to dream. Even him, and even her.

He’s been standing watch for about an hour or so when it begins. No twitching or moaning, not like she claims to have seen in him; she is a wild creature, and she dreams like one too.

She has no control. She has no _discipline_.

She doesn’t twitch and she doesn’t moan.

She seizes and she shudders, and she makes noises that Monkey has never heard from a god before, high frightened whimpers and low guttural snarls, the occasional start of a scream, swiftly smothered, like a wounded animal forced into hiding, knowing that any sound loud enough to be heard will likely be her last.

She is desperate and frightened and in terrible pain; she is everything this awful world has made her, and it is so horrifying, so unbearable that Monkey almost wishes she would dream of him instead, of his staff at her throat, his hands stopping her breath, his body covering hers, the sorts of nightmares that he himself might’ve had, if—

If the worst thing he’d ever had to worry about was one stupid fight, one near-death experience.

He’s got worse things in his head now. It took him five hundred years, but he has learned that other people’s deaths — even other people’s _almost_-deaths — are more traumatic than his own by far.

Going by the noises she’s making, he doesn’t want to know what the things in _her_ head look like.

He tries to ignore her.

He tries to turn away, to focus on keeping guard, keeping watch, keeping them all safe. He scans the horizon for enemies that he knows don’t exist, squinting through his weakened, worthless eyes, scouting and scouring and searching for something, anything to distract him. Futile, he knows: they chose to camp here specifically because it’s safe, because there is nothing here to threaten them. No distractions, no dangers, nothing to divert his attention, and his imagination isn’t good enough to conjure demons where there are none.

Except, apparently, in the sewer.

His stomach clenches. He turns back, watching with nausea in his belly as she curls up in a ball, whimpering and whining, hugging herself like she’s lonely and lost and scared, like hers are the only arms that ever held her.

He wants so badly to ignore her.

But then the noises break off, tangling and twisting in her ravaged throat, still hoarse from what he did, and instead of whimpering or whining she starts to _sob_.

And he can’t ignore that, he _can’t_—

It’s one of the smallest sounds he’s ever heard, and also one of the loudest. It shakes through her body, and his as well, weaker than any human and more powerful than any demon. He’s never heard a human sound so fragile, so breakable; he’s never met a demon that made him feel so sick inside, that clawed at his heart and filled him with anger and guilt and shame. He feels helpless, he feels hurt, he feels _strangled_, like some small part of him is sharing whatever horrors her mind is putting her through.

More than anything in the world, he wants to run away and leave her — leave all of them, if that’s what it takes to never have to lay eyes on her again — but he can’t seem to move his body at all.

He can’t—

He blinks, and suddenly he’s at her side.

He doesn’t know how he got there. He’s sure he didn’t move, but here he is just the same, a hand on her shoulder, shaking her, and the sound of her sobbing is like a maelstrom inside his head, like the squeezing of the crown back in the sewer, a thrumming, pulsing echo of that stupid, awful chant, overpowering and unbearable, enough to bring even the great and powerful Monkey King to his knees.

He needs it to stop. He needs it to _stop_.

“Wake up,” he rasps, feeling the panic trap the words in his throat, strangling them and suffocating them and killing them like he would have killed her. “Wake up, dammit, wake up!”

She does.

She wrenches out of his grip, shaking, and her eyes fly open. The last of the sobs die in her throat, crushed by the bruises, and she stares blindly up at him: awake, but not aware.

He locks eyes with her, trying to pierce that empty, dead-star look, to find some echo of the pain he heard, some shadow of the nightmare that wracked her body and his heart.

But there is no more clarity in her now than there ever was before, consciousness chasing away the burst of emotion, the whimpers and the sobs, the experience that must have come with so much pain. She looks confused and disoriented, like she has no idea where she is or how she got there, but she doesn’t look distressed at all.

A part of him resents her for that.

She tries to sit up, but she’s still sleep-heavy and off-balance and he has to touch her again to stop her from falling over. He doesn’t relish the contact, but she seems to appreciate it, leaning into him with a hazy little half-smile, like she doesn’t really know who he is, like she thinks he’s—

“Tripitaka?”

Monkey snorts. “Try again.”

“Oh.” The smile slides off her face as realisation strikes, and she doesn’t even bother trying to mask her disappointment. “Hello, Monkey.”

He rolls his eyes, bemused and a little bit annoyed. “You could at least pretend you’re happy to see me.”

“Why would I do that?” She’s furrowing her brow, earnestly confused, like she’s trying to solve a messy, complicated riddle. “You never do.”

Well, he can’t exactly argue with that, now, can he?

“That’s different,” he grouches. “_You’re_ annoying.”

He expects that to get a rise out of her, but of course it doesn’t. She just blinks a couple of times, like she’s shaking off the cobwebs of a headache, then dismisses it with a sigh and a weary, stiff-shouldered shrug.

“I suppose that’s true,” she concedes, infuriatingly agreeable. “Did you want something?”

“Did I...” He stares at her. “Are you serious?”

“Um.” Her frown deepens, and her confusion with it; she looks thoroughly baffled. “Should I not be?”

“You—”

He stops, though, before he can accuse, and forces himself to step back and look at her. Really look at her, deeply and completely, like he knows Tripitaka would tell him to.

She really is serious. He can see that quite clearly. She’s chalk-white, damp with sweat and still shivering a little, every inch of her body touched by the nightmare, but there is no hint in her expression that she remembers any part of her dream at all. Her eyes are typically empty, her features blank, and she’s fidgeting nervously like she’s waiting for him to tell her what to think and feel and do.

He wets his lips. She mirrors him, looking anxious. “Monkey?”

“You seriously don’t...” he starts, then shakes his head. “Wow.”

“What?” 

That, he thinks, is a very good question.

He wants to tell her. He wants to watch her face as he describes the noises she made, the pain and the fear, the whimpers and the strangled screams and the sobs. He wants to see if she reacts at all, if she’s any more capable of grasping the hell inside her head than the one in the world beyond. He wants to make her hear it, make her see it... and maybe, in some twisted corner of his psyche, he wants to make her relive it, so she can share it with him too, so she can explain at last what this nightmare of a world has done to her.

He wants to understand—

No.

He really, really doesn’t.

He—

Hating them both, he swallows his pride and pain, and he says, ever so quietly, “It’s your turn to stand watch.”

The clouds behind her eyes dissipate at last, and she breaks into a smile. “Oh!”

The clarity is no less unsettling than the confusion was. Maybe because it’s made a liar out of him.

“Yeah,” he sighs, feeling like a fraud and a fool. “Why else would I wake you, huh?”

“I wouldn’t know.” The smile doesn’t fade, but now she’s frowning a little bit too. The conflicted expressions make her look as young as she probably is, and oddly endearing. “You do so many strange things. How am I supposed to keep them all straight?”

Monkey sighs. So much for endearing.

It doesn’t help that she’s not the first one to accuse him of that. Tripitaka mentions it at least three times a day, no doubt thinking he’s being funny, and while Pigsy never actually says the words anywhere he can hear, still Monkey can see them written between the lines on his face, flickering behind the twinkle in his eyes and the twitching of his mouth when he’s trying a little too hard not to smirk.

He doesn’t appreciate it from them, either. But at least they have some vague notion of normalcy to measure him by. At least they know what _strange_ actually means.

Sandy does not. She doesn’t get to call him—

She can’t even remember her stupid dreams. She doesn’t get to call him anything.

She doesn’t get to look at him like that, empty-eyed and smiling blankly, not caring that he held her life in his hands, that every scar on her stupid scrawny body was the product of his bad decisions, that he is the reason she was born to a lifetime of hiding in the dark, of getting hurt and being scared and sobbing in her sleep, that it is his fault all the stars in her eyes are dead or dying or worse.

She doesn’t get to just pretend that’s not true. She doesn’t get to just _forget_—

Not when he can’t.

The anger digs its claws in again, deeper and hungrier; it tightens across his throat like the weight of his staff, presses into his temples like the crown growing tighter and tighter, driving in until he’s blinded by it, until he can’t see anything, not her smiles, not her scars, not the empty space behind eyes.

He lurches to his feet, clenching his fists and his jaw.

“Get up,” he rasps. “And stand watch. Understand?”

She stands, effortlessly fluid and infuriatingly graceful, and dusts herself down, still smiling, like there’s nothing cruel or unfair in the way he’s bossing her around, like she would expect or hope for nothing less.

Once, five hundred years ago, Monkey might have taken some pleasure in that. Now, it makes him feel sick.

“Of course,” she’s saying, blithe and hazy and too cheerful. “You know, you look dreadfully tired. You should definitely try to get some sleep.”

He growls. It takes a great deal off effort to loosen up his jaw enough to speak again.

“I was planning on it,” he forces out. “If you can stop your babbling for ten seconds.”

She winces, shame colouring her cheeks for a fraction of a second. “Oh, um, sorry?”

“Don’t say that.” It’s a whine, jagged and pitchy, like maybe he’s not really ordering her, like maybe a part of him is asking, pleading, _begging_ with her not to apologise to him, who deserves it least of all. “Just... don’t.”

“All right. Um...”

She reaches out, shy and self-conscious, and touches his shoulder. Her fingers are thin and cold, all bones and sinew, and they dig in much too hard when she squeezes; no doubt she means it as a gesture of compassion, but she doesn’t really know her own strength or how to control it, and if he were a weaker god it might almost have hurt. If he hadn’t already figured it out from every other part of her, the contact makes it quite clear that she’s not used to touching people, that she’s likely never had a reason to try.

“Stop that,” he tells her, voice flat.

She looks down at her hand, blinking rapidly. She doesn’t let go right away, and for a moment or two he wonders if she doesn’t actually know how. Her fingers spasm briefly, squeezing even harder, and then her whole arm goes slack, falling away from his shoulder like the muscles have suddenly remembered how to unclench.

To his immense relief, she doesn’t apologise again, even though she actually has a good reason this time. She shoves her hands behind her back, tucking them safely out of the way, and says, “Sleep, Monkey. You’ll be of no use to Tripitaka if you’re tired.”

It irritates him, the way she says it, irritates him that once again the monk is her priority. He’s fast asleep on the other side of the fire, oblivious and unaware, and yet still he’s the only thing she thinks about. She doesn’t care if Monkey is exhausted for his own sake, or if his tiredness will impact their speed or progress; all she cares about is Tripitaka. Every single time, exactly the same. Like she can’t fathom a world beyond him, like she can’t see further than his next word or smile or frown.

She was the same way in Locke’s prison, he recalls bitterly. _Tripitaka will think of something, Tripitaka will save us, Tripitaka will break down these god-forged prison walls all by himself with his tiny human fists..._

“Your infatuation with that little monk is getting old,” Monkey says, snapping back to the present before he can snap in other ways. “Is he really the only thing you care about?”

Sandy stares at him like he’s just asked her to single-handedly unravel the secrets of the universe. “I don’t understand the question.”

She really means it, with absolute sincerity. He can tell from her face, the usual discomfort coloured slightly by frustration and shame. She really can’t fathom that there might be something weird in bevelling down every atom of her focus to one tiny human. She really cannot grasp that there might be other things out there in the world to strive for or work for or—

Or _live_ for.

He thinks of the sewer, her throat under his staff, her eyes seeking out the monk’s face like it was the only thing in the world, like she could die happy so long as she died looking at him. And he thinks of the scars on her body, the ones left by demons and humans, the ones left by the struggle just to survive, infection and environment and animal teeth, the twisted thinness of starvation, and he wonders how long it really was, how make years she spent down there in the dark, suffering and struggling, starved and scarred and waiting, waiting, _waiting_—

He shudders.

“Forget it,” he says, eyes shut tight to drive back the discomfort, the nausea, the horror. “I’m going to sleep. Wake me if you hear anything. You understand?”

“Of course.” She’s smiling again when he opens his eyes, waving at him like she really believes they’re the best of friends. “Sleep well!”

He doesn’t smile or wave back. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. He just shrugs, grunts, and doesn’t lie down until he’s as far away from her as he can get.

Somehow, he really doubts he’s going to sleep well.

*


	2. Chapter 2

*

Well or not, at least he does get some sleep.

He knows this only because he wakes, groggy but alert, to warm sunlight bathing his face and Sandy’s voice grating against his nerves.

Will he ever be free of it, he wonders.

She’s sitting on a rock a short distance away, scribbling away in her stupid little journal and reading every other word out loud. There’s a lilting musicality to her voice, like someone trying to speak a language they learned through songs and poems, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying to a newly-awoken god who, by his own admission, is really not a morning person.

He sits up, growling and grumbling and trying very hard to remember why he doesn’t actually want to kill her.

“What in the seven hells are you doing?”

She twitches upright, startled out of her reverie, and beams stupidly at him. “You’re awake!”

“And _you_,” he presses irritably, “are making far too much noise for this early in the morning.”

She blinks, head cocked at an improbable angle, and peers sideways at him. “It’s not that early.”

That’s likely more true than he’d care to admit, going by the height of the sun. What was Tripitaka thinking, letting him sleep half the day away? Does he really think the sacred scrolls are going to find themselves?

“Where’s the monk?” he demands, not bothering to smother his morning sourness; for Tripitaka, perhaps he would, but Sandy doesn’t deserve it. “And the other one, for that matter. Don’t tell me you scared them away with your babbling.”

“Of course not.” The very idea makes her bristle. “Pigsy’s foraging for breakfast, and Tripitaka wanted to bathe.” And she holds up a hand, ticking off the following points on her fingers like she’s making sure she remembers them all: “Alone. In private. Without company. On his own. In a state of isolation. By himself.” She looks up when she’s done, and fixes Monkey with a firm, authoritative stare. “That means _alone_.”

“I know what it means.” His head is starting to ache already; he massages his temples and swallows a groan. “So it’s just you and me?”

“Yes.” Evidently, she thinks this is wonderful news. Monkey does not. “Would you like to play a game?”

He doesn’t dignify that with a response.

At least, not right away.

Instead, he climbs to his feet, stretching out his sleep-sore muscles and shaking off the last of the grogginess. His mouth is sour and tastes of ash and smoke, so he grabs a waterskin from their pack and drains the whole thing, acutely aware of Sandy watching him, blithe and dumb and full of cock-eyed optimism, like she’s so sure he’s going to say ‘yes’ just because he hasn’t yet said ‘no’.

Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

He thinks again of Locke’s prison, the two of them stuck together, him climbing the walls, agitated and angry and claustrophobic, and her blithe and smiling and careless, utterly convinced that Tripitaka would storm the gates at any moment to mount a rescue.

He wasn’t interested in her life story back then, but she offered it anyway, the words spilling out of her like milk from an upturned bottle. It was the first time she actually became serious, he recalls, the first time that stupid vacant smile fell off her face. The first time he looked into her eyes and saw how empty they really were.

Remembering it now makes him shudder, but it also makes him think.

He doesn’t want to think. But—

But not thinking is much worse.

It’s worse not knowing, not understanding, not being able to connect with her. It’s worse, so much worse, looking at her and seeing only dying stars and living scars, an emptiness he can’t touch and a world of pain and nightmares that won’t give him peace. They’re all his fault, those awful things, and he won’t be able to rest until he can understand them, until he can _look_ at them, at least, and not feel the weight of it bearing down on his throat, squeezing his head, cutting off his breath—

“Fine.” The word bursts out of him, desperate and haunted, almost before he’s fully resigned himself to saying it. “Let’s play.”

Sandy stares at him for a fraction of a second, wide-eyed and baffled, like she can’t quite make sense of what she’s just heard.

Finally, hesitantly, she asks, “Really?”

“Why not?” He shrugs, unable to meet her eye, and crosses to her side, sitting himself stubbornly down on the other side of her rock. “Gotta do something to pass the time until they get back, right?”

“True.” She sets her journal aside, smiling at him like he’s just gifted her the moon itself, and the few stars that still remember how to shine. “You first or me?”

“You.” He’s trying a little too hard to be careless, and with anyone else it probably wouldn’t work, but Sandy has never been able to see anything beyond the fringe of her own eyelashes, and she certainly doesn’t see the tension in him now. She sees only what matters to her: that he is willing to play. “It’s your stupid game, you go first. But if you ask a single question about my love life, I’ll string you up and leave you to hang. Clear?”

“Of course,” she agrees, exuberant. “Why would I ask about that, anyway? I already know the answer.”

And she _smirks_.

Monkey bites down on his tongue. Hard.

“Just ask your stupid question, will you?”

Finally, blessedly, she goes quiet, chewing her lip and contemplating the issue with absolute seriousness. For the brief but glorious time it takes her to think up an interesting question, Monkey wonders if he should maybe indulge her childish whims more often, if only just to shut her up for a while.

But then the silence is over and she comes back to herself with a start, curiosity and mischief glittering behind her smile, and he quickly changes his mind.

“All right,” she says, at long last. “What’s it like to fly?”

Monkey blinks his surprise. After the last time, he was expecting something much more invasive.

“Seriously?” he manages. “All those personal questions spinning around in that head of yours, and that’s what you want to know?”

“Why not? Supposedly, you can do it. Not that we’ve seen any evidence, mind...” Her smile sharpens, the way it does sometimes, giving the illusion of coherence; it startles him so much that he nearly forgets to be annoyed. “But I can’t. So I’d like to know what I’m missing. Aren’t you curious, too, about things you’ll never experience?”

“Not really.” His honesty seems to surprise her; she starts blinking so rapidly he’s worried she’ll give herself vertigo. “If I can’t experience it, then it can’t be that worthwhile.”

Sandy looks distant for a moment, a little bit reverent and a little bit sad. “I don’t think that’s true,” she says quietly. “But that’s my question. Answer it as you will.”

He thinks on it, with some measure of seriousness. He owes her that much, at least.

“It’s flying,” he says, after entirely too much thought. “It feels like flying. You know?”

She doesn’t look at all impressed. “Surely there’s more to it than just that.”

There is, of course, much more to it than just that. But Monkey has never had much talent at giving a voice to his feelings, and this is no exception. He wouldn’t even know where to begin putting it into words at all, much less finding ones that someone like Sandy might understand.

How to explain, to someone who can’t even hold onto her own name, how it feels like to soar among the clouds? To hover above the world, above the people (gods, humans, demons, they all look the same from such a height), above their senselessness and their stupidity, their empty, hollow, meaningless lives, above everything that makes the world so difficult to live in, and everything that makes it such a joy to return to...

It’s freeing, it’s beautiful. It’s nothing he could ever describe, not to her or anyone else.

He would look down and take the whole world in his hand, squeeze his fingers together and imagine he was crushing it all to dust. And then he would look up — and up and up and _up_ — and see the black endless sky, the stars sprinkled like sugar above him, and be transformed from the king of everything to the tiniest nothing there ever was.

To fly is to be a part of something vast and unfathomable, to be a part of the universe itself, the endlessness beyond the edges of the world. It is to live beyond humans and demons and gods, beyond _life_, to go on and on, forever and ever, alone.

He doesn’t realise that his cheeks are wet, not until Sandy’s breath catches and her smile flickers and fades. He doesn’t realise that his throat is stinging, that his eyes are burning, that he is—

No.

The Monkey King doesn’t _cry_.

It’s just the ash from the fire, that’s all.

It’s definitely not the memory. 

It’s definitely not the echo of it in his head, the phantom sensation of the world dropping away, the air rushing past his face, catching the wind in his hands, feeling the cloud respond to his thoughts, his movements, his heart, the rhythm thrumming in his veins and across his skin, every piece of him thriving and whole and _alive_.

He wonders if he will ever know that feeling again. He wonders if his cloud will ever heed his call again, if he will ever be able to summon it again. He wonders, looking around this world that was born from his folly, if he will ever deserve to.

Is the cloud is punishing him, he wonders, for the world he made with his arrogance?

Maybe it’s fitting. Hells, maybe it’s even fair. Condemned to walk this hell that he created. To walk among demons and humans, stuck with broken gods whose eyes burn with dead stars, to never again see the real ones alive and burning, so far away, bright and beautiful and _burning_...

He doesn’t look at Sandy. “That’s a stupid question.”

“Oh.” The disappointment thickens her voice, makes her sound small and subdued. He wonders if she’s upset by the lack of an interesting answer or simply ashamed of her poor questioning skills; knowing her, it could be either, both, or something else entirely. “Well, perhaps you’ll think of a better one. Your turn, yes?”

_Yes_.

Monkey closes his eyes, steadies his breathing, focuses his thoughts. It’s more of a trial for himself than for her, he suspects, but he’s made up his mind to broach it and he won’t shy away from that decision now. If he’s going to be able to look her in the eyes, he’s going to have to learn to see this wreck of a world through them.

“All right.” He takes one last deep breath, then blurts out his question in a rush, before he can change his mind: “Why are you so empty?”

She makes a startled, strangled sound. “I’m sorry?”

“You heard me.” He refuses to let his voice shake, no matter how badly it wants to. “I tried to kill you. You should feel something.”

Finally, tense and twitching all over, he wills himself to open his eyes. Hers are still dull and vacant, but she’s staring at him now like she thinks he’s the one on display, like it’s his emptiness being poured onto the ground, not hers. Like the question says more about him than it does about her.

It bothers him that she might not be completely wrong about that.

“Um,” she says at last, very quietly. “What do you think I should feel?”

“I don’t know. _Something_.” He tries to catch his breath, but it seems to have abandoned him completely; there’s nothing in his lungs but a raw, razor-sharp pain. “I tried to kill you. I assaulted you, held you down, crushed your throat. I stopped your breath, almost murdered you in your own home. You’ve still got bruises. And you’re calling it... what? A ‘mark of friendship’?”

Sandy waves a hand, as though to dismiss the whole affair. “You made a mistake,” she says. “Tripitaka told you what I was, and you laid down your weapon.”

That’s not exactly what happened, Monkey recalls, feeling again the mnemonic burst of pain in his head, the echo of Tripitaka’s whispered chant, the crown tightening and tightening, driving him to his knees, forcing him to let go of his prey. If not for the monk and his magic spell, he wouldn’t have stopped until she was dead, and by then it wouldn’t have mattered what she was or how he felt about it.

But, hey, if she wants to think he let her go by choice rather than by force, he’s not going to burden her with the truth. Not when he’s still a little haunted by it himself.

“And that’s enough?” he presses instead. “Me ‘laying down my weapon’?”

She waves again, not quite so dismissive now. Her eyes are still empty, burning with the embers of dead stars and broken memories, but there are lines under them them that he didn’t notice before. She’s tired, he realises, and wonders if she got any more sleep at all last night. He won’t ask, of course, but still he wonders. A step towards compassion, Tripitaka might call it; he’s not so sure.

“Not everyone does,” Sandy says at last. “It’s no safer for gods, if the wrong person catches one. Less safe, in fact, because demons do much more damage than humans.”

She says it so blithely, so simple and incidental, like this really is the only kind of reality she can fathom, like it’s perfectly normal to know from experience how much damage a human or a demon can inflict on a god. Monkey feels sick with anger and helplessness, and he wants so badly to go somewhere private and punch the nearest tree until it falls.

“No-one should be doing any amount of damage to you,” he says queasily. “No-one should ever leave the kind of marks I saw on your body last night. Not on anyone, but especially not on a _god_.”

“But they do.” She shrugs. “Humans see a demon, they attack because demons are dangerous and terrifying and would attack them first if given the chance. Demons see a god, they attack because gods are a threat, because we could become dangerous too, if left unchecked. It doesn’t matter which face they see when they look at me. Demon or god, there’s always someone who wants my blood.”

Monkey’s own blood boils to hear it, burning hot with impotent fury; he wants to tear apart the monsters that would do this to one of his kind, and he wants to shake her too, for letting them do it.

“You’re supposed to be able to defend yourself,” he rasps.

“I can.” She tilts her head a little, as though trying to remember. “You’ve seen me in battle. You know this.”

“Yeah, and I’ve felt your throat under my staff, too. Great self-defence there, genius.”

It’s unfair, and they both know it. He hates himself for letting it slip, cruelty for something that was not her fault; talented or not, even the most powerful gods would struggle against the Monkey King, and no-one knows that better than him. It speaks volumes that she seems to know it too, that her expression hardens, if only for a moment, sensing that she is being called out unjustly.

The anger is a strange, unexpected thing in her. It’s fleeting but vividly effective, a flush of colour touching her cheeks, a glint of light behind her eyes, the faded stars blazing and bursting briefly to life.

But then it’s gone, and in the blink of an eye, she’s back to the dazed, confused creature she was before, like she’s never felt a moment of anger or injustice in her worthless, wretched life.

“We all have our off-days,” she says softly. “You are my superior in combat by far, and you had the element of surprise on your side as well. You know perfectly well why you bested me.”

He growls, but concedes the point. “Fine. Sorry.” 

“Mm.” She waves off the apology, just as she waves off everything else he says. “But that’s not what you’re really talking about, is it? When you tell me I should defend myself, you don’t mean against you.”

“No.” He sighs. “No, I don’t.”

She sighs too, softer than him but somehow lower as well; even her sighs are hoarse, it seems. He watches as she closes her eyes to focus her thoughts, watches her lips move as she murmurs to herself, whispers in a strange language he doesn’t recognise. One from some corner of this new world, perhaps? He doesn’t know, and he has no interest in finding out.

Finally, reluctantly, she opens her eyes and looks at him. Well, at his tunic, anyway. Close enough, by her standards.

“This is the only world I’ve ever known,” she says, pain burning through every word. “I wasn’t always as powerful as I am now, or as brave or well-armed. I was young once, and small and weak and helpless. I didn’t know what I was or what it meant or how to...” She shakes her head, and the flicker of pain vanishes, as if she’s locked it up behind a heavy door. “Well. I suppose it doesn’t really matter any more, does it?”

It does matter, Monkey thinks savagely. It matters a lot. And he doesn’t understand why she doesn’t—

“It’s not right,” he hears himself snarl, temper rising again on her behalf. “Attacking a god like that. The pieces they tore out of you, it’s not...” He swallows, blinking rapidly to banish the memory. “It’s not _right_.”

Sandy only shrugs.

“Perhaps not. But so it was, and so it is.”

Her eyes grow dim, then, losing what little focus they had. He watches her disappear behind her confusion, her vacant smiles, the emptiness and distance that he hates so much. 

“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t do that. Don’t—”

“That was an interesting question,” she says, ignoring him. “My turn.”

“No.” He wrings his hands to keep from clenching them into fists and lashing out at the nearest inanimate object. “No, I’m not done yet.”

“I don’t know that there’s anything else I can tell you,” she says, seemingly sincere. “I’m here, and I’m still alive. You didn’t kill me any more than anyone else ever has, but you were the first to lay your weapon down when you learned the truth.” She touches her throat, still covered by his scarf, and the faintest flicker of discomfort twitches on her face. “A mark of friendship, just as I said. The mark will fade in time, but hopefully the friendship will not.”

Monkey flinches. He doesn’t know why. “That’s stupid.”

“Perhaps so.” She shrugs. “But it’s a greater gift than any of my other wounds ever gave me.”

Her smile flickers a little as she says it, a glimmer of life swiftly extinguished. The sight of it makes Monkey feel even sicker. He clenches his fists, locks his legs and squares his shoulders, wills his body into stiffness to keep it from flinching again.

“What has this world done to you,” he asks in a ragged whisper, “that you see any kind of wound as a _gift_?”

He knows the answer already, of course. It’s printed all over her body, painted on the walls inside her head, blues and blacks and the bleakest white he’s ever seen. He knows exactly what it’s done to her, this hell that he’s unleashed, this world that is the only home she’s ever known, this place where violence is the only kind of gift a god can hope to receive. He doesn’t need to hear it, he doesn’t want to hear it, he knows, he _knows_, he—

He lurches to his feet.

She blinks up at him as he moves, smiling that unsettled, lopsided smile of hers. He thinks he sees a flash of something darker behind her eyes, but it’s gone before he can really be sure, swallowed and consumed by the blooming of her pupils.

“You asked your question already,” she reminds him. “If you want another turn, you have to wait until I’ve had mine.”

“No.” His voice is shaking harder than his hands. He hates the loss of control, the savagery gripping him by the throat, rendering him helpless; he hates it, and he hates that she can see it, the myriad tiny reactions rippling through her like the water she loves so much. “No, we’re done here. I’m not playing your stupid game any more.”

“Fine.” She pouts, folding her arms. “Then I’m not answering your questions.”

After so much anger and pain and helpless frustration, it’s almost a comfort to go back to something they both wear well: stubborn, petulant childishness.

“Whatever.” He crosses his arms too. “It was rhetorical anyway. Like I care about your stupid life story.”

She stares at him for a moment, clouds blurring behind her eyes, shrouding the stubbornness as she struggles to piece his words together, reordering and restructuring them into something her scrambled brain can make sense of. It’s always such a struggle, getting her to understand anything, but this time he suspects it might be deliberate.

Finally, she shrugs, blinks the clouds out of her eyes, and says, “As you wish.”

And that, so far as she’s concerned, is that. The conversation over, a line drawn under it, she picks up her journal again and starts scribbling away in it like nothing ever happened. In five minutes, he expects she won’t even remember that they talked at all.

Head aching, throat sore, he doesn’t know whether to pity her or envy her.

*

Leaving her alone with her journal and her scattered thoughts, he finds a private, secluded spot and spends the rest of the morning trying to summon his cloud.

It ignores him, of course, just as it ignored him the hundred other times he tried to call it since being released from the rock. He’s getting used to the answering silence by now, but this time it feels personal, like there’s a kind of wilfulness, almost spite to the way it refuses to heed him, the way it won’t even let him know it’s still alive.

He’s not sure it _is_ alive, exactly. But that’s how he’s always thought of it, just as he looks up at the sky now and thinks of it as stubborn, wilful, and brattish.

Clearly, the stupid thing is doing this on purpose. It has always been attuned to his feelings, his needs and his wants; if it is still out there somewhere, it must know how desperate he is to get away from this awful world, to leave it behind if only for a few minutes. Clearly, it’s decided he doesn’t deserve to feel that kind of peace.

Maybe he doesn’t, at that.

Maybe...

The Master used to chide him for running away like that. He would summon his cloud when the stuffy arrogance of the Jade Mountain became too much, and fly away for days at a time, leaving it all far behind. No more stupid lessons, no more stupid gods, no-one to boss him around or tell him what to do, no idiot instructors or teachers, no Master to shake his head and sigh and _expect_ things.

Up and up and up he’d go, soaring above the world, above the Jade Mountain, above all the other clouds — human clouds, he used to call them, because they were weak and limited and mortal, not at all like his — to what felt like the highest point in the whole world. Higher than any god had ever been, alone and content, with the star-speckled universe wrapped around his shoulders like a great big blanket made only for him.

And there he would stay, for as long as he liked.

_“You can’t hide from your problems, Monkey,”_ the Master would sigh, when he finally returned. _“It’s selfish to try.”_

Monkey didn’t see what was so selfish about wanting some time to himself once in a while. Wasn’t that why he’d been gifted with the cloud in the first place? What was the point of having the stupid thing if he couldn’t make use of it when he wanted to?

He understands it a bit better now. At least, he thinks he does.

Maybe it wasn’t really the wanting-time-alone part that was selfish. Maybe it’s just the fact that he left all his problems behind, for the other gods to deal with in his absence.

It’s no different from what he wants to do now: fly up and up and up, away from this awful world and the awful creatures it has spawned, the powerful demons who rule without mercy, the downtrodden humans who have become twisted by their own desperation, and the weak, worthless gods who would just roll over and let it happen. The world wouldn’t go away, he knows — the suffering would continue without him, just as it has for the last five hundred years — but at least he wouldn’t have to look at it.

He’d just leave them all to their fate. Humans, demons, even the gods. Every last one of them.

Given the choice, given his _cloud_, he would fly away from this nightmare and never come back.

And that—

That is so much worse than what he did back then.

At the Jade Mountain, the problems he left behind weren’t really his fault. The Master and his expectations, the other gods and their seething jealousy, the way they would all try to stifle him and smother him and suffocate him, stop him from doing what he wanted just because they couldn’t understand how powerful he really was. He had a thousand reasons to want to be free of them, and a thousand tricks to see it done.

All he wanted back then was a little bit of freedom once in a while. Was that really so much to ask for?

He didn’t think so.

He still doesn’t really think so.

But what he wants now...

That, he knows, is too much.

This world is his world. It is the the product of his pride, his arrogance, his—

His _selfishness_.

He wanted to make a point. He wanted to show them all, before he stormed out and flew away for the very last time, that he was worth more than all of them put together, that he really was a king among gods. He wanted to make himself missed, to leave a mark that the Master would remember, a mark that they’d _all_ remember.

Well. He did that much, at least.

But if he’d known how deep that mark would run, how badly it would scar while he slept in peace...

He doesn’t know what he would have done.

He only knows what he wants to do now. What he’s trying to do, even. Alone and worthless in the middle of nowhere, whistling for a cloud that will not come, mouth dry and throat sore, every last part of him aching and broken by this world that he made, this world where gods are hunted and hurt like animals, with scars on their bodies and screams in their heads, where humans can control them with their weapons or their words, where demons rule over everything wearing gloves made of iron and boots wet with blood.

He’s here to make it right, to fix his mistake. Isn’t that what Tripitaka told him?

Right before he started reciting that stupid chant.

Right before he started using it to manipulate him, to silence him, to _control_ him.

Monkey doesn’t owe the monk a damned thing.

Not after that.

He doesn’t owe anyone. The only person he ever owed was the Master, and he’s dead.

So who cares?

Not him.

He doesn’t—

He—

He closes his eyes and sees Sandy’s scarred, scrawny body, so young and yet so ravaged by all the years she’ll never get back. He sees the lines of starvation and survival, the marks of fear and hatred and violence, the countless colours of brutality and desperation, of sickness and fear and pain. He clenches his fists at his sides and remembers how it felt to crush her throat, so sure that a creature as wretched and wrecked as that could only be a demon, a monster, an abomination. He lifts his head and imagines he can hear her voice, discordant and distant and halfway dead, the shimmering of her confusion, the stuttering of her coherence, the shattering of her sanity.

Every part of her is a reminder of what was and a monument to what is, the perfect world he left behind and the monstrous one that he created. She is a finger pointed at his chest, the hoarse, broken voice of blame, the echo in his head whispering, over and over again, _you did this._

How is he supposed to stay here when he can’t stop seeing it?

How is he supposed to do the right thing, protect and defend this world that so offends him, when she’s right there every time he turns around, smiling and blinking and looking empty, the living, breathing embodiment of every hellish thing—

Every _nightmare_—

He throws his head back, gazes up at the sky, tries to see as far as he can. Not far enough; like the rest of his powers, his vision is so limited now that he feels almost blind. He can barely see beyond the wisps of cloud, the heavy morning haze that makes him want to sneeze. If his cloud is up there among them, he can’t find it; perhaps it doesn’t want to be found.

“Please,” he whispers to the empty air. He’s never begged before, no human or god or anyone else, and it’s only the fact that he is entirely alone that keeps him from flushing with shame. “_Please_. I can’t stay here!”

But he knows, even before the heavens respond with only sunlight and birdsong, that he has no choice.

He made this world. He was selfish and arrogant, and he wanted to be a king.

Now he is. And all he wants is to tear the crown from his head, jump up onto his cloud, and fly away.

But he can’t.

He can’t because the cloud won’t heed him, because it has tied him down, bound him to this bruised, broken earth. He can’t because it will not let him be a coward and it will not let him be selfish, because, for once, it will not let him run away from his problems and leave them for someone else to clean up. He can’t because—

Because he will still see her, even when she’s not there.

Because he knows that he will be forever haunted by her broken body and her empty smiles and the dead stars in her eyes. He could fly to the ends of the world, find a place untainted by demons, untouched by gods, unseen by humans, and make a kingdom for himself there. He could become a proper king, a perfect king, with no subjects but the grass and the rocks and perhaps a real monkey or two... but the instant he closes his eyes, he knows that he’ll see her.

The scars and the bruises, the echoes of her nightmares resounding in his head, twisted and transformed until they sound like a monk reciting that awful chant. The horrors this world inflicted on her and the hollowness it left behind, the way she can’t meet his eye, the way she smiles at nothing, the madness and the confusion, the things she can’t keep in her head and the things that spill out like water, the things she can’t remember and the things her nightmares refuse to forget.

She is so lost. She is so—

She is what this world is.

Wrecked and ruined and ravaged, nothing left inside but the fading light of dead stars.

He wants so badly to run away from them both, the god and the world that made her.

The world that _he_ made.

Just like he ran away from the Jade Mountain, from the Master’s fading body and his dying words, from the gods who would chase him to the end of the world just to bring him back, from the punishment he wouldn’t even try to fight.

It’s what he always does, isn’t it? Fly away, as far and as fast as he can, trying to outrun the consequences of his actions.

Not any more.

The Master used to tell him that life wasn’t about what he wanted from it, but about what it needed from him. He hated that way of thinking, and — stubborn, angry young god that he was, puffed up and glutted on his own self-importance — he took great pride in saying so. He hated that it stripped him of his choice, his desires, of everything that mattered so much to him. _I do what I want_, he would sneer at anyone willing to listen. And he said the same thing to Tripitaka, too, the instant he stepped out of the stone.

Five hundred years, and he hasn’t learned a damned thing.

He still doesn’t want to do the right thing.

He still doesn’t _care_ about the right thing.

He just wants...

He wishes he’d never laid eyes on any of them. Sandy with her dead stars and living scars, Tripitaka with his binding words and his quiet compassion. Pigsy with his efforts to atone, the greedy, selfish, lazy bastard who is still somehow a better person than him. He hates them all, and he hates himself most of all.

He wishes he’d never been freed. He’d sooner sleep for an eternity, trapped in stone, than live through this.

He wishes...

He wishes a lot of things.

But when did wishing ever change a damn thing?

*

He’s not feeling any better by the time he skulks back to camp.

The one saving grace — the one thing that stops him from turning around and throwing himself off the nearest cliff in desperation — is that Sandy is no longer alone.

Pigsy, back from whatever mud-filled hole he was rolling around in, has sat himself down in front of the fire and is cheerfully chopping up various roots and plants. Monkey spares him only the briefest of glances, then grunts and crosses to the other side of the fire, exuding an air of what he sorely hopes is _‘leave me alone’_.

It doesn’t work.

Oblivious to his self-isolation, or else simply choosing to ignore it, Pigsy offers him a smug little wave and chirps, “No luck with the cloud thing, huh?” 

Monkey glares. “How could you _possibly_—”

“Your curses were quite loud,” Sandy volunteers helpfully. “And very colourful. They did not sound triumphant.”

Pigsy snickers. “Might want to work on the ol’ self-control next time,” he says, “if you want to keep it a secret.”

There is only one reasonable, rational response to that, Monkey thinks, and he delivers it with gusto:

“I hate you both.”

Pigsy just laughs some more, long and loud and obnoxious, then shakes his head and goes back to his labour. Sandy, peering at him in that confused, cock-eyed way of hers, seems to be trying to figure out whether he’s being serious or hyperbolic.

“Sorry,” she says, phrasing it more like a question than an apology.

Monkey can’t help himself; his already-seething temper flares hotter, and he shoots her a look that could burn a glacier to ash. 

“Just shut up, will you? This stuff is hard enough without you—” He gestures vaguely, too angry and upset to find the right words. “—doing that thing you do.”

“Um.” She doesn’t look frightened or affronted, only earnestly and naturally confused. It does little to balm balm Monkey’s scorching temper. “Which one?”

Monkey wishes he had Tripitaka’s priestly restraint, or even just a little of his tact. He doesn’t want to give the honest answer — even in his current mood he doesn’t want to hurt her when he knows it’s not her fault — but he has never been particularly good at evading or hiding the truth; he has plenty of flaws, he won’t deny that, but if there’s one thing he’s never been, it’s a liar.

“Existing,” he says. “Just... _existing_. Here. In my space. When I’m trying to... to _breathe_.”

“I...” She swallows raggedly. He watches the line of her throat catch as she does it, dislodging his scarf; she fumbles to keep the stupid thing in place, to keep it from falling off and exposing his humiliation. “I don’t mean to make things harder for you, Monkey.”

“Yeah, well, you do.”

It is brutal, the honesty, for all that he tries to soften it. It hurts him almost more than it seems to hurt her, but he won’t insult either of them by trying to lie.

“What’s your problem?” Pigsy asks, raising an eyebrow. He doesn’t seem particularly eager to throw himself into the fray, but perhaps a part of his penitence is protecting the god he forced into hiding for so long, because he’s very quick to step in and defend her now. “If anything, surely she’s the one who should be mad at you.”

“That _is_ the problem,” Monkey snaps.

Pigsy lifts the other eyebrow. He seems about half a breath away from pressing him — a bad idea for everyone — when Sandy pipes up:

“He’s upset that I don’t feel more.”

Her voice is dull, and an octave or two lower than usual. She sounds exhausted.

Monkey, feeling rather the same way himself, only grimaces. “Something like that, yeah.”

Sandy hides her face; the distance seems to help her to continue. “He thinks I should be angry. With him, for trying to kill me. With others, for doing other things. I think...” Her jaw, the only part of her he can see behind the curtain of her hair, goes pale. “I think he thinks I should be angry about many things. It makes him angry on my behalf, I think, that I’m not.”

Monkey winces. It’s true, all of it, but it’s not exactly flattering to hear it said aloud, and especially not in that empty, toneless voice of hers. If only he could hide behind his flawless locks as easily as she hides behind her knots and tangles.

Pigsy, meanwhile, mulls it over for about half a second, then shrugs like it doesn’t deserve any more consideration than that.

“I suppose that makes sense,” he quips, dry but not derisive. “Anger is about the only emotion that meathead understands.”

Monkey huffs, simultaneously grateful for the levity and annoyed by the jab.

“It’s not the _only_ emotion,” he shoots back. “It’s just the most productive.”

Pigsy snorts, but doesn’t seem inclined to make a debate out of it. Maybe he feels it’s not his place to get involved, or maybe he just doesn’t care; either way, he bows out of the conversation and turns back to his vegetables, absorbing himself completely in the mindless rhythm of manual labour.

Sandy, meanwhile, is thumbing through her journal, brow furrowed in deep concentration. For a blessedly deluded moment, Monkey assumes she’s simply forgotten they were talking, retreating as she often does to whatever weird little corner she feels safe; he’s just about to whip out his staff and start training, if only to give himself something to do, when she stands, stalks over to his side, and thrusts the book under his nose.

“There is nothing productive in anger,” she says, very quietly.

He blinks but humours her, taking the book and frowning down at the tattered, well-thumbed pages.

It’s a very old entry. The ink is so badly faded he can barely make out the words at all, and the parchment is torn and stained with—

“Is that _blood_?”

She doesn’t answer, simply points a finger at the parchment and nods at him to read.

He tries. He really does. But her written words — what few he can make out — are almost as illegible as her spoken ones.

There are only a handful of complete sentences, none of them coherent, and trying to follow her crazed train of thought is like chasing a rat through a maze; she clearly had no idea where she was going herself, so how in the seven hells is he supposed to follow? Her handwriting is as much of a mess as the rest of her, chaotic and half-mad, and he suspects it would be just as hard to read even if the ink was fresh and new.

He recognises a few words, scattered like thrown confetti, in no particular order. ‘Hurt’, underlined and then scratched out. ‘Sharp’, ‘scream’, and ‘sick’, the three words running together like she was trying to make them one. ‘Why’, about a dozen times, each given its own line and followed by varying numbers of punctuation points.

The rest, to his straining eye, is a jumble of confused nonsense.

“This makes no sense,” he snaps, shoving the book back at her.

She still doesn’t say anything. Eyes shadowed by her hair, expression unreadable, she flips forward a couple of pages, then hands it back. He rolls his eyes, but takes the stupid thing and tries again.

It’s mostly just another mess of the same words, but they’re a little more legible now, jagged pen-strokes in dark ink, larger letters, most of them capitalised, as though scrawled in a fit of temper. ‘Why’, again, this time with a full line of question marks, and ‘NO’, just once but in massive print, taking up almost a full page by itself.

He flips forward. More of the same but larger still, starker, stronger, more jagged and more emphatic as he works his way through page after page.

One is ripped almost in two, the parchment riddled with holes, like she stabbed it with the pen and then tore it with her bare hands. Another is heavy and dark with more bloodstains, so much that the few words are entirely obscured. Another is covered with crude drawings, childish but for their content: blood-soaked weapons and body parts, acts of the most unspeakable violence, each more graphic and brutal than the last. Depictions of things that happened to her, maybe, or twisted revenge fantasies. He doesn’t know and he is too afraid to ask.

Another—

He slams the book shut, feeling sick.

“I _was_ angry,” Sandy says quietly. She takes back the book, tucking it away with warmth and affection, like it’s something precious and beautiful, not the chronicle of nightmares Monkey now knows it to be. “For the longest time, I was very, very angry.”

Monkey doesn’t know what to say, so he settles for, “Oh.”

Sandy ignores him, lost in her own thoughts. “The world was very cruel,” she whispers, like he doesn’t know that already. “It was cruel, and it was unjust, and it did the most unspeakable things to me. Things you can’t even imagine. Things I had to forget or lose myself. I was alone and I was in pain and I was frightened, and I...” She’s shuddering a little, the way she did in the sewers, cowering behind Tripitaka after he saved her life, like her body is in shock. “I was so angry I couldn’t breathe.”

The last word seems to catch in her throat, rasping painfully against the places where his staff pressed. Looking at her, listening to her, Monkey finds that he can’t breathe very well either.

“That’s enough,” he manages. “I get it.”

“No, you don’t.” She takes a moment to recover herself, then draws herself up to her full height, impassioned in a way he’s never seen her before. “All those things you would have me feel now? I’ve already felt them. I felt them so deeply and for so long they almost drove me mad.”

On another day, he might wonder about that ‘almost’. But not right now. Right now, he can only stare, awed and ashamed, as the dying stars behind her eyes flare vividly to life. It’s only for a moment, a half-flame that sputters and dies almost instantly, but it is enough, and Monkey finds himself backing away, genuinely scared for the first time since he woke.

He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know what to feel, what to think. He feels shaken and stunned, and he doesn’t know where to begin processing it all.

The violence in her journal is a brutal, horrifying thing, but at least it makes sense to him. The part of him that is a warrior, at least, can put those pieces together and understand. She suffered horribly, and so she was angry; who wouldn’t feel and think and write such horrible, violent things after being forced to endure them? Who wouldn’t want to document their pain and rage, who wouldn’t want to fill page after page with revenge fantasies and hateful thoughts?

He understands that. It shakes him, shocks him, but he understands it. If she treated him the way she treated those early pages in her book — threatened him, assaulted him, spat or cursed or scrawled gruesome, nightmarish pictures of him — he would understand. He hurt her, he humiliated her. He crushed her throat and tried to kill her. Whatever she did, however she wanted to punish him for that, he’d understand.

But that version of her is not the one standing in front of him now, and he does not understand how someone can go from _that_ to _this_.

To scrawl such horrifying, hellish, honest things onto pages soaked with blood, blinded by anger and pain, barely literate but having to vent it all somewhere, and then become so numb, so hollowed-out and empty and lost that she would stand there and smile at the god who tried to strangle the life out of her? To go from the kind of madness that stems from righteous fury to the kind that would call a near-death-experience a ‘mark of friendship’?

This, he cannot fathom.

“What happened to you?” he asks, in a voice as hoarse as hers. “Where did it all go?”

“It was taken from me,” she says. Simply, softly, and with a sweetness that makes his teeth hurt. “And replaced with something better.”

He doesn’t see how emptiness is better than anger. He doesn’t want to be the arrogant meathead that Pigsy thinks he is, but he really, truly can’t see it.

“With what?” he demands, frightened by how desperate he suddenly feels, how badly he wants to understand this, understand her. “Replaced with _what_?”

She doesn’t answer, of course. He’s getting used to this by now.

She squints down at him for a few moments, dull-eyed and hazy like she often gets, like a normal person might look if they had a terrible headache, like she’s trying to wrap her tiny mind around the question. The little life he saw behind her eyes is long gone now, swallowed down by her usual disjointedness; her expression flickers like the sun passing behind a treeline at great speed, lurching from vacant smiles to flashes of something darker, never quite settling on either, and then—

And then she lifts her head, startled like a wild animal as she spots something behind him, and every part of her grows clear and bright with joy.

“Tripitaka!”

Head bowed, still working on his vegetables, Pigsy murmurs, for Monkey’s ears only, “There’s your answer.”

From what he’s seen, Monkey can definitely believe it.

Sandy’s whole damn life centres on that little monk. Everything she thinks, everything she feels, everything she believes, it all revolves around him. She says his name like the humans in the old world used to talk about the gods of Jade Mountain: like he is something ethereal, something beyond the mortal world, sacred and holy and untouchable. Monkey used to revel in that sort of worship when it was aimed at him, though of course the Master chided him for it. But seeing it in reflection now, a god turning that kind of devotion onto a _human_...

It’s unnatural.

It’s so wrong it makes his skin crawl.

He could probably hold Tripitaka in his hand, if he wanted to. In the prime of his powers, he could probably smite the little human with a thought, much less a _touch_...

He doesn’t let himself think too hard about the fact that he owes Tripitaka his freedom.

He tells himself again, for perhaps the hundredth time, that he owes the monk nothing.

He didn’t ask to be freed. He didn’t ask to be made the hope of millions. He definitely didn’t ask for the crown to be cemented to his head, a shackle in everything but name. He didn’t ask for any of this, and he owes nothing to the tiny, worthless runt of a human who made it happen.

Sandy owes him nothing either. Her survival was her own, and no human has the right to claim it.

Especially after what his kind did to her. Monkey has seen it, he knows. She shouldn’t feel that way about one of them. Even a good one, even the very best of them. She shouldn’t—

The way she looks at Tripitaka is twisted and wrong. She looks at him like he is her whole world, like her survival, her existence hinges on whatever value he deigns to give her. Like—

Like the sight of him, weak and fragile and mortal, is enough to breathe the life back into all those dead stars.

Monkey turns away, unable to bear the sight of her like that, wide-eyed and awestruck and driven to worship.

He tries to block out the sound, too, but that’s a whole lot harder. Sandy’s voice is lilting, musical, the way it always gets when she speaks to Tripitaka, her usual distance giving way to something startling and bright, a kind of clarity that only seems to exist as long as she’s looking at Tripitaka or she believes he’s looking at her.

Monkey doesn’t understand how it works, and he doesn’t really want to. All he knows is that it sets his teeth on edge to hear her say, as happy as a child, “Did you have a nice swim, Tripitaka?”

Tripitaka is smiling when Monkey ventures a glance at him. He chooses to sit near Monkey, not with Sandy, but he’s looking at her with genuine fondness, like maybe a small part of him appreciates the blind devotion.

That’s not very monastic of him, Monkey thinks privately, but of course it’s none of his business.

“Sorry I took so long,” Tripitaka is saying, to all three of them.

Pigsy waves off the apology. “Not like we’re going anywhere.”

Sandy raises a hand. “I’d like to bathe again before we leave,” she says, shy and hopeful and sickening. “May I do that, Tripitaka?”

Monkey growls. He can’t help himself. Her vacant, hollow smile scrapes against his nerves, and all the more so now that he’s seen the darkness that once dwelled in its place, all that violence and anger poured out onto the pages of her tattered, blood-drenched little book, pain and brutality and the stifled power of a wronged, wounded god. He can’t stand to see her like this, a housebroken animal that bows her head and begs humans for scraps.

“He’s not your mother,” he tells her. “You don’t need to ask his permission for every little thing.”

He looks at her, only to find her gazing starry-eyed at Tripitaka. “I know that.”

Tripitaka, flushing a little, doesn’t seem to know which one of them to look at. “Monkey,” he warns.

“Let him say what he will,” Sandy says. “It comes from a place of friendship.”

Pigsy snorts his derision at that. “And I thought I was deluded.” He softens a bit when Sandy turns to look at him, forehead creased with confusion, and simplifies for her: “I mean, don’t you think it’s a bit of a stretch?”

“Not really.” Her baffled shrug says it all: ‘deluded’ is clearly the appropriate word. “He wants me to be angry because he believes anger is the key to survival. He wants me to show more strength because he believes that will keep me safe from the terrible things that I...” Her voice hitches ever so slightly; it’s barely noticeable, but Monkey catches it even so, despite his best efforts not to see anything. “Never mind. My point is, he means well and his intentions are good. It’s not his fault that he wasn’t born to this world like I was, and it’s not his fault that he doesn’t understand what it means to live in it.”

She’s biting her lip when he glances at her, and he thinks he sees something new glimmering in her eyes. Not stars this time, neither living nor dead, but something a little closer to the ground, more like the water that she claims to control. He tells himself he doesn’t recognise it, and turns away again.

“That’s stupid,” he tells her, staring fixedly at the ground. “I don’t ‘mean well’, and I don’t have any ‘intentions’, good or otherwise. I just don’t want you slowing us down, that’s all.”

Tripitaka makes another warning sound, but Monkey pays it no more heed than he paid a moment ago when he hissed his name. Let the stupid little human use his chant, if he wants him to stop; otherwise, he can spit into the wind for all the good it’ll do.

Sandy, meanwhile, is maddeningly unoffended. “Call it what you will,” she says. “I may understand very little about social interaction, but I have lived long enough without friendship to know it when it appears.” Her breath stutters, like she’s a little overwhelmed by the thought, in spite of herself, then she shakes it off and turns back to the monk. “May I bathe now, Tripitaka?”

“I...” He sighs, jaw paling as he clenches it. “Sure, Sandy. Whatever you like.”

She beams, bright and almost beatific, and then she’s gone, vanished in the blink of an eye with nothing but a trail of mist left in her wake.

Tripitaka shakes his head, a hint of sorrow touching the affection now, and shuffles over to help Pigsy.

Monkey lets the idle drone of their voices fade into the background, surprised by how easy it is to block them out. Between the chatter and the labour, they’re not exactly quiet, and yet somehow it’s easier to ignore the two of them together than it is to try and ignore just one of Sandy, even at her quietest. Her presence, when she’s there, is like a heavy weight bearing down on his shoulders, like edges of the crown pinching his temples, the monk’s chant drilling all the way through him.

Now that she’s gone, even just briefly, Monkey feels like he can breathe again. Like he can pretend this world isn’t really so different from the old one, without her there to remind him of how cruel it really is.

He doesn’t want to think about what it means, what _she_ means. He doesn’t want to think about—

Hells, he doesn’t want to think about anything.

He just wants to push it away, this world and everything in it, and pretend things are just as they always were.

And for the blessed but brief time she’s not there to drag it all back to the surface, that’s exactly what he does.

*


	3. Chapter 3

*

Later, when they’re back on the road, Pigsy tells him in no uncertain terms that he’s being an ass.

“You,” he pants, huffing and puffing and straining to keep up, “are being an ass.”

Monkey, being in no mood to have this conversation, picks up his pace. “Is this supposed to be new information?”

To his credit, Pigsy is not so easily deterred, not by the dismissal nor by the increased speed. The latter proves rather more difficult for him, as always, but he tries just the same; the effort is obvious, sweat streaking his face and every breath shot through with strain, but he holds his ground and doesn’t give an inch. Apparently this is just that important to him.

“Seriously,” he gasps, when he musters a spare breath. “What’s your problem?”

Monkey could think of a few different answers to that, if he were in the mood to discuss it. He’s had nothing but problems ever since Tripitaka yanked him out of his prison and into this mess of a brave new world; he could list a dozen without even trying, but he’s not exactly in the mood to share any of them with a god who sold his soul to the highest demon bidder.

“None of your business,” he mutters, the words rather more succinct than his thoughts.

Pigsy snorts. Breathless as he is, it comes out more like a whine.

“Right, yeah, _no_,” he says. “I’m gonna go ahead and say it becomes my business when you start making everyone else uncomfortable.”

Monkey rolls his eyes. “I don’t see anyone else complaining.”

“That’s because you’ve got your head shoved so far up your—”

As petulant as ever, Monkey trips him.

“You were saying?”

Pigsy scrambles back up to his feet, glaring. “That’s mature.”

“If you’ve got something to say,” Monkey snaps, “just say it.”

Apparently it’s not as simple as that, or else he just needs some time to pluck up the courage; either way, he doesn’t say anything for some time, opting instead to catch his breath and his balance, falling behind for a little while before summoning another burst of strength to bring him back to Monkey’s side.

Monkey, happy to let him wear himself out over this, continues to pick up the pace, little by little over the next few minutes, until Pigsy is straining twice as hard just to get back to where he started.

Sadly, the childishness does not deter him. When he’s finally caught up with him again — looking rather the worse for the exertion — he shoves himself directly into Monkey’s field of vision, blocking the way so Monkey can’t pass.

“Seriously,” he says again, forcing him to make eye-contact. “If she bothers you that much, why don’t you just ignore her?”

A pulse of heat ignites in Monkey’s head, anger so intense it nearly blinds him.

“I’ve been trying,” he snarls. “Do you know how hard it is to ignore someone as present as she is? Doesn’t matter what I do or where I go, she’s always there. Always talking and smiling and—”

“Existing?”

Monkey’s own word, from earlier. Pigsy says it with a smile, but without any of his usual humour; it’s tight and tense, clearly meant to sting, and Monkey hates that it works. It takes more effort than he’d care to admit, trying to keep the cut from showing, and if the wry look on Pigsy’s face is anything to go by it’s not entirely successful.

“She’s everything that’s wrong with this stinking world,” he says, clenching his teeth to keep his voice from breaking. “She’s confused and clueless and completely crazy, and she’s _covered_ in...” He hesitates, not sure whether to say ‘scars’ or ‘pain’, not sure which of the two is the more accurate; eventually, he gives up and lets the sentence hang unfinished. “You can’t just ignore stuff like that.”

“She’s made peace with it,” Pigsy points out. “Why can’t you?”

“Because it’s _wrong_.” He can’t believe he needs to explain it, and least of all to the only one of his companions who should remember the way things are meant to be. “No god should ever, _ever_—”

“No arguments here,” Pigsy interrupts, a little too hastily; maybe he does remember, at that, and maybe he wishes he didn’t. “But it happened, yeah? The world is what it is, right or otherwise. You’re not going to change it back by getting mad at someone whose only bloody crime was living in it.”

The word makes Monkey laugh, crude and crass and shot through with pain. Suddenly, he’s the one losing breath and having to slow his pace to try and catch it again.

“You call that living?” he rasps. “I’ve never seen anyone so dead inside.”

Pigsy takes a long moment to think about that. He’s dragging his feet all the more now that Monkey has lost his momentum, and seems to be relishing the slower pace. Monkey has never been the kind to let a conversation or a journey drag itself out — he’d sooner talk fast, act quick, and get the damn thing over with — but Pigsy is an expert in making any task last three times longer than it needs to.

Even thinking, apparently. Even about something that should be obvious.

“You sure you’re looking in the right place?” he asks, after what seems like an eternity.

His tone is just about irritating enough to give Monkey a second wind; he picks up the pace again, solely out of spite, and mutters, “There’s not that much of her to look at. She’s even scrawnier than the monk.”

That part may be an exaggeration, but Pigsy is smart enough not to derail the conversation by calling him on it. Instead, he latches neatly and frustratingly on to Tripitaka’s name, raising a pointed, suggestive eyebrow.

“You’ve seen the way she looks at him, right?”

“Uh huh.” The thought of it makes him viscerally uncomfortable, and so he treats it the same way he treats everything else he doesn’t like: by pretending it doesn’t exist. “The same way she looks at _trees_.”

Pigsy rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t dispute the point. “Not so many trees growing in the sewers,” he shrugs. “She probably hasn’t seen one in years.”

The truth of that slams into Monkey like a charging demon. So many things he’s taken for granted that Sandy has likely never even seen. This time, when his body starts to shudder, he doesn’t even try to suppress it.

“Don’t you see how messed up that is?”

Pigsy, again, doesn’t answer for a while. It’s a jarring change from Sandy, who blurts out every thought in her head, however insane, and Monkey isn’t sure whether to be grateful or annoyed by the long, drawn-out pauses.

It would be entirely too easy to assume that it’s the breathlessness making him stop, that he’s just too exhausted to speak more than once every few minutes. Monkey doesn’t think so, though; he recognises a thin cover when he sees one, and if he has learned one thing about his companions in the short time they’ve been travelling together it’s that Pigsy is much, much shrewder than he wants the rest of them to believe.

Finally, when he seems to think Monkey has stewed long enough, he says, “Messed up or not, it is what it is.”

Monkey massages his temples. “So I keep hearing.”

“I’m serious.” To his credit, he looks that way, expression sober even through his panting. “The way she looks at that little monk... hell, the way she looks at trees, too, if you want to play it that way. If you can’t see the life in that...” His jaw pales for a fraction of a second, then relaxes. “Yeah, you’re definitely looking in the wrong place.”

Monkey growls his annoyance. “Maybe _you’re_ looking in the wrong place. I think I know an empty god when I see one.”

“No,” Pigsy says quietly. “You really don’t.”

There is an uncharacteristic weight to the way he says it, and though he knows it can’t end anywhere good, still Monkey finds himself curious. “Huh?”

“I’ve seen a damn sight more of this world than you have,” Pigsy explains, subdued and strangely sad. “If you really want to see empty gods, I could show you things that’ll make you crawl back into that rock of yours and stay there for the rest of your life.”

Going by the look on his face, Monkey doesn’t doubt it. Still, because he can’t help himself, he huffs, “I doubt it.”

No doubt seeing through the shaky bravado, Pigsy ignores that. “I know what empty looks like in a god. I’ve seen it, up close and personal, more times than I’d care to think about. But her...” His eyes seem to catch fire, then, blazing with that same quiet awe that Monkey sees in Sandy when she looks at Tripitaka, like they can see something he can’t, something blinding and beautiful. “She’s the most vibrant god I’ve seen in years.”

That...

Monkey stops walking. He stops—

He stops _breathing_.

For a moment or two, at least, he—

He can’t fathom it.

He thinks of her dead-star eyes, her vacant, hollow smiles, her lack of comprehension and clarity. He thinks of her exposed skin, the scars slithering up and down her body, serpentine and sickening; he thinks of the jutting bones, the hard lines of privation and pain. He thinks of her nightmares, the strangled screams and the shuddering sobs, the nothing behind her eyes when she woke and couldn’t remember. 

He thinks of her journal, the blood and anger seeping through the parchment, indelible and inescapable, the look on her face as she tucked the book away, safely out of sight. _I was angry_, she said to him, like she thinks anger is something she can just write down and then toss into the fire to burn and be forgotten, lost like the memory of her nightmares, her cries echoing inside his head, vanished from hers the moment she woke.

“Every feeling she once had is gone,” he says to Pigsy, swallowing futilely over the lump in his throat. “Just yanked out of her and thrown away. Everything. Just _gone_.”

Pigsy looks him dead in the eye. It’s a strange thing, unexpectedly jarring after so long dealing with Sandy and her confounded feints at eye-contact. He almost has to readjust now, to speaking with a god who can look at him and connect with him, a god who is nearly as normal as he is. He’d almost forgotten that such a thing existed in this stupid world.

“Not everything,” Pigsy says after a beat, quiet but intense. “Just the things you want her to feel. If you’d only pay attention for a minute or two, you’d see just how much she’s capable of feeling.”

Monkey snorts. “Confusion isn’t a feeling.”

Pigsy stares at him for a long, disbelieving moment, then shakes his head and quips, “Sure looks like one from where I’m standing.”

Monkey, feeling generous, lets that slide.

*

He doesn’t have to deal with Sandy again until they break for lunch.

Then, thanks to Tripitaka’s well-intentioned meddling, he has to deal with her a lot.

“You can’t always leave all the food preparation to Pigsy,” he chides.

That is, he’s chiding when he looks at Monkey. When he looks at Sandy, he gets all soft and gentle, like somehow she’s not to blame for being worthless but he’s to blame for being lazy or whatever. Monkey can’t help thinking that’s unfair.

“We’re not leaving it to him,” he mutters sourly. “He _likes_ all that stupid food prep stuff.”

Pigsy chokes. “Wouldn’t go that far, mate. I’m just smart enough to know that we’d all starve to death if we waited for you two planks to get anything done.”

Tripitaka, biting down on the inside of his cheek, says, “Why don’t you two go hunting for once?”

It’s not the most unreasonable demand in the world, Monkey concedes grudgingly, and all the more so because it’s — technically — his fault that Pigsy’s more exhausted than usual; he worked himself ragged trying to keep up long enough to finish their earlier conversation, and in any case it’s not untrue that he’s done almost all of their hunting and foraging thus far.

Still, Monkey can’t help bristling a little at the plural.

“I can hunt alone,” he gripes. “I don’t need _her_ help.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” Sandy agrees, staring fixedly at the ground and not talking to anyone in particular. “But it’s the only part of food preparation I have any talent in. If you really want me to help, Tripitaka, I will gladly do so, but for all our sakes I wouldn’t recommend tasking me with anything else.”

Monkey scoffs. “Surely even _you_ can hold a carcass over a fire until it’s cooked.”

The look on Sandy’s face — flushing slightly with embarrassment and twisting a lot with discomfort — makes it quite clear that she can’t.

The implications of _that_...

Even Pigsy looks slightly nauseated. “How in the seven hells are you still alive?”

Sandy shrugs. “I’m very durable.”

“Yeah, no kidding.” He shakes his head, impressed and disgusted in equal measure. “More lives than a bloody cat, you.”

Monkey ignores him. He’s still staring at Sandy, slack-jawed and queasy, still trying to figure out how anyone, god or otherwise, could survive as long as she did on whatever hellish things she must have eaten down there in the dark and dank, without ever having learned to cook. Thinking on it, he supposes it makes a kind of sense — how would a fire stay lit in the damp of a sewer, anyway? — but still it horrifies him beyond words.

Is there any part of her, he wonders for the hundredth time, that hasn’t been tainted and poisoned by the world that birthed her?

“You’d be surprised,” she says with that distant cheerfulness he hates so much, “what people can endure when they have no choice.” Then, seeming to discard the one train of thought in favour of the other, “Shall we go, then?”

Monkey turns to Tripitaka, arms spread in desperation.

Tripitaka, as unsympathetic as Monkey has come to expect, only shrugs and says, “Make yourselves useful.”

Sandy lights up, of course, beaming in that vague, disjointed way she has, like the sun has started shining brighter because Tripitaka has spoken to her, because he’s given her something to do. She unwinds Monkey’s scarf from around her neck, shakes it out, then carefully puts it back on, securing it firmly and with great diligence, like a warrior putting on his battle armour. Like she really thinks this is some great big life-or-death mission just because Tripitaka gave it to her.

Monkey is not quite so enthused.

But he’s not about to be shown up by a damaged little upstart, either.

If she’s not going to start trouble over this, then neither is he. And in any case, what’s the worst that can happen? If he can’t endure her company for a few minutes, even with a genuine, practical task to occupy him, then he’s not fit to call himself the Monkey King at all.

“Fine,” he grouches, drawing his staff. “But if she says or does anything stupid, it’ll be _her_ roasting over the damn fire.”

*

To his relief, she doesn’t give him any reason to see the threat through.

She does, however, make the task of hunting a very irritating one.

It’s not exactly a surprise. From his experience, there’s very little in his life that she doesn’t make irritating.

To his annoyance, she’s not entirely without talent. She may not know how to cook or prepare her food safely, but she’s clearly well accustomed to having to stalk and steal and snatch whatever she can find. He doesn’t really want to think about what sorts of toxic meals she had to choke down in the sewers, but living that way has left her very good at responding to motion. The slightest rustle in the grass, the faintest shift in the air, and off she goes, nothing left in her wake but mist and cold air.

She catches three rabbits before he’s managed to even track one, and if he didn’t already hate her company, he certainly would by now; no-one makes the Monkey King look bad, and especially not some broken little wreck of a god who can’t even lace her boots without getting distracted.

It is this sense of self-preservation, and the unwillingness to suffer any more bruises to his ego, that prompts him to suggest a change of scenery.

“We’re good on rabbits,” he grumbles after an infuriating half-hour, stopping her in her tracks before she can go charging off again. “I want to go fishing.”

She stiffens. He’s gripping her arms, holding firmly to keep her in place, and he can feel the sudden tension under his fingers, the muscles seizing and locking up, every inch of her pulled as tight as a drum. Despite himself, he starts; he’s only really seen her lock up once since they started travelling together: in the throes of her nightmare, crying and shaking and trying not to scream, her body curled up tight, her arms wrapped around herself like—

Like they would now, he’s sure, if he wasn’t holding them so hard.

She doesn’t try to pull away, doesn’t resist him at all, but there is something raw and ragged in her when she looks up at him and says, “No.”

Monkey swallows the discomfort, wills himself not to let it show on his face. “Scared I’ll do better than you once we’re in the river?”

That’s ridiculous, of course. He realises that even as he says it; with her talent and her powers working together, she’d be unstoppable.

Maybe it’s an act of compassion, he muses. Maybe she just doesn’t want to make him watch her strip again, ashamed of her body now that she knows how badly it affects him. Maybe—

“No,” she says again.

He rolls his eyes. Well, he tries to; he’s not sure how well he really succeeds, unnerved as he is. Still, he’s nothing if not an expert in bravado, and he allows a little bit of roughness to the surface when he lets her go and turns his back on her.

He’s not about to stand around all day debating this with her, not when Tripitaka and Pigsy already think they won’t be able to work together. If she can’t come up with a cohesive reason why his idea isn’t brilliant — and of course she can’t, because it _is_ — he’s not going to waste his time discussing it.

“Stop your whining,” he says, already striding towards the rushing water. “We’re going, and that’s that.”

In the blink of an eye, she’s in front of him again.

“_No_.”

And she shoves him in the chest, hard.

The shock of it catches him off-guard. He stumbles backwards, surprised and more than a little annoyed. He knows that she has very little control of her strength, that she probably doesn’t realise just how much of a punch she packs, but there is an explosive sort of violence to the way she puts her hands on him now that says she’s aware now, and more than willing to escalate if he tries to push back.

If he were human, he thinks, or even a demon, she could do some serious damage, intentional or otherwise.

Luckily for them both, he is neither of those things, and he’s no average god either. He could easily take whatever she tried to dish out, with or without control, but he won’t; he wouldn’t be the Monkey King if he let some nobody shove him around for no good reason.

He takes a step back, slow and very pointed, then whips his staff into the space between them, quick as a blink, and twirls like a dervish. It sustains the distance between them very well, acting as a barrier and a none-too-subtle threat, both at the same time.

“What’s your problem?” he demands, flexing pointedly.

Sandy lurches backwards, wide eyes locked on his staff.

“We don’t need to go fishing,” she mumbles, more restrained now. “It would be a waste of time, and pointless. There’s enough rabbits here, enough plants and other things. Easier to catch, easier to eat. Best for everyone. We don’t need anything different. We don’t need...”

Her voice catches, and she stops, looking at him with a strange, nameless sort of helplessness. It makes him think again of the sewers, the memory sharp and unwanted, the awful look on her face when he had her choking under his hands, the way she stared at Tripitaka like he was her saviour, her eyes wide and desperate, her chest heaving against his arms, her mouth moving silently, her pleas for salvation, strangled and swallowed as he pressed down and down and _down_—

He turns away, eyes closed, feeling his own breath stutter.

“No,” he realises weakly. “It’s something more than that.”

She’s twitching when he opens his eyes again, both hands at her throat, fiddling awkwardly with his scarf and biting down hard on her lip. He wonders if she’s remembering the same thing he is, if maybe the hidden bruises are a little more painful than she wants to admit.

“We don’t need to go fishing,” she says again, the repetition urgent and feverish. “We don’t... _I_ don’t...”

But again, her voice betrays her, cracking and splintering the rest into incomprehensible hoarseness. Whatever is bothering her, she’s feeling it very, very strongly. It’s more than he’s ever seen in her before, and it slides between the ribs like a blade, sharp and sort of subtle at the same time. He thought it would bring some measure of relief, to see her finally _feel_ something, but it doesn’t. Quite the opposite: it makes him feel uneasy, and very worried.

“Seriously,” he says, swallowing hard. “What’s this about?”

She narrows her eyes, calculating and thoughtful; for once, her confusion is nowhere to be found. From the look on her face he wonders if she’s going to try and make another game out of it, demanding that he answer one of her stupid questions before she’ll deign to answer his. He’s not sure if that’s where she’s actually going, but he decides not to take any chances: he looks her dead in the eye, stills his staff, and swings it at her head without a word.

_Answer straight,_ he doesn’t say, temper flaring as she dodges by instinct. _For once in your stupid, messed-up little life, give me a straight answer, or I swear I’ll_—

“I can hear them.”

It’s a whisper, raw and ragged and thoroughly miserable, and for a long, perplexed moment Monkey can only blink and stare.

“You...” He swallows, shakes his head, tries again. “...huh?”

“I can _hear_ them.” She’s staring blindly at the end of his staff, biting her lip so hard he’s a little concerned she’ll draw blood, looking wretched and lost and thoroughly ashamed. “The creatures that live in the water. Inside my head. I can hear them. Their voices, their feelings, their...” She whimpers, and for a fraction of a second the shame is replaced by a pain so old it steals Monkey’s breath. “I don’t want to have to listen to their cries and screams while we kill them, Monkey. I really don’t want to have to do that today.”

Monkey shrinks his staff down and sticks it in his hair, mostly just so she’ll have to find something else to stare at; the anguish in her eyes is making him hurt in places he’d rather not have to think about. She’s swallowing convulsively, like she’s trying not to be sick, and she looks so miserable, so helpless and harrowed and small, that he feels like he’s holding in his hands something more fragile and precious than her life.

“Okay,” he says slowly. “I get that. Voices, spirits, it’s a thing. And you have that... water whatever. So...” He shrugs. “Makes sense, I guess. But why don’t you just shut it off like a normal—”

_Oh_.

He knows why, of course, but it’s too late to take the question back.

It’s the same reason she can’t do anything, the same reason he looks at her sometimes and doesn’t see a god at all. Because she was made _here_, in this nightmare of a new world, confused and wretched, not knowing how to do even the simplest, most basic things. Because she has lived her life completely alone, with no-one to explain what was happening and how to deal with it, no-one to learn from, no-one to ask, no-one to talk to. Because she—

“Can’t,” she mumbles, looking ashamed.

Because _that_.

The simplest thing in the world, silencing the spirits and the whispers of the world around them. One of the very first things a god should learn, intuitive and automatic, even in infancy.

And she has no idea how to do it.

Monkey sighs. “You’re even more messed up than I thought.”

For once, he doesn’t mean it as an insult.

Whether or not she takes it as one, he can’t tell. She’s staring at the ground again, hiding her face. Hiding her eyes, her expression, her everything. All he can see is that she’s trying very hard not to tremble.

“If you’re going to hunt fish,” she mumbles, “I’m going to go back to camp.” She pauses, then peeks up at him through the curtain of her hair. “That’s better for you anyway, yes? Won’t have to suffer my company.”

In spite of himself, he hesitates. He doesn’t really know why. He’d give anything to be free of her, that hasn’t changed, and this is about the best excuse he could hope for. _Sure, off you go, I can handle this alone._

But he doesn’t.

Instead, for no reason that he can make sense of, he hears himself blurt out, “Nah, we’re good.”

Sandy does a double-take. “Um?”

“I said we’re good.” He tries to glare, but it’s not very effective. “Rabbits, plants, all that stuff. Like you said, it’ll be enough. Wouldn’t want Pigsy to get all spoiled and lazy, now, would we?”

Sandy narrows her eyes, piercing, searching, studying him. Then, when she’s finally convinced he’s being sincere, her whole body slumps with relief, so much that it’s a wonder her legs don’t give out under her.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank—”

“Don’t,” he snaps, bristling in spite of himself. The gratitude might be welcome, but she looks just about ready to pass out from the weight of it. “I’m not doing you any favours or anything. It’s just good sense.”

“Ah.” She exhales, still a little shaky. “Of course.”

And that, thank the heavens, ends the conversation.

Monkey tries not to think about it any more. It’s another blow against him, another for the ever-growing list of ways that this world has failed her — ways that _he_ has failed her — and the too-many other gods like her, lost and hidden and unprepared for the power simmering inside them, no-one to teach them how to control it or channel it or use it safely, no-one to teach them how to stop it from driving them mad.

There were a few like that, he recalls, back in the world that was. It was a simple thing, as intuitive as breathing once it was learned, how to master the voices, to soothe and silence the spirits whispering in their minds, to coexist with them and not be overwhelmed. Almost every god Monkey had ever met could do it without so much as a thought, but there were an unlucky few who simply could not do it. Poor students, poor gods, or just plain poor, who could say for sure, but he remembers it vividly, with a shudder that wracks him from head to toe, their madness a thousand times worse than hers.

Sandy is not lacking in talent, this he knows from experience. She just lacks education and experience, the lifetime that was stripped from her before she was even born. He wonders—

_No_.

He doesn’t let himself wonder. He doesn’t—

What kind of god might she have become with the proper tutelage, the proper guidance? What might she have grown into under the Master’s gentle hand? He would have taught her so well, Monkey knows, he who had so much empathy, even for his most challenging students, he who had so much patience...

The thought shakes him like an earthquake. He has to bite down hard to smother a sob.

Sandy blinks at him, sensing something amiss. Monkey wills his lip to curl, his eyes to flash, wills himself to harden all over, so that no trace of his sorrow or weakness remains. He waves a hand at some vague point in the distance, pretending he’s spotted another rabbit, a deer or a hare or something, _anything_ hiding in the brush or the grass, hiding—

He lurches away, hiding as well, behind the lie.

“Come on,” he snaps. “We’ve got work to do.”

*

They return to camp triumphant. As if there was any doubt.

The victory is mainly hers — he has only a couple of rabbits to his name, shamefully meagre next to her heavy string of catches — but he wouldn’t be the Monkey King if he wasn’t able to twist someone else’s successes into his own.

He offers to carry their well-earned bounty back to camp, not out of any kindness or acknowledgement of Sandy’s hard work, but so that he can be the one to toss it at Tripitaka’s feet, smirk, and say, “Useful enough for you, monk?”

Tripitaka wrinkles his nose at the flourish, but even his monkish restraint isn’t enough to hide his approval when he sees the fruits of their labours. 

“I’m glad you two were able to work together,” he says, like that was the point of the exercise all along.

Which, knowing him, it may well have been. Monkey rolls his eyes, and pretends he doesn’t hear that.

Sandy, meanwhile, smiles blithely and says, “Monkey is a very effective hunter, and a very good friend.”

Pigsy splutters, trying in vain to smother a laugh. “Yeah, can’t really see either of those, to be honest.”

Monkey ignores him too. “I’m not your _friend_,” he says to Sandy, feeling his triumphant mood beginning to sour. “Just because I—”

He stops, gulping back the rest of the sentence as she flinches and goes pale with panic, eyes widening to saucers, so desperate to hide her truth from her precious monk.

“Nothing,” she says, voice low but very sharp. “You did nothing. It was merely an observation, that’s all.”

Monkey frowns, but doesn’t call her on it.

It’s such a strange thing to get embarrassed about, he thinks, and much like everything else about her he can’t find any reason for it. All those nightmares she’s endured, the ones in her head and the ones carved out of her body, so much suffering and misery, starving and eating scraps and scrabbling just to survive, and _this_ is what she chooses to waste her distress on? The whispers of spirits inside her head, voices she never learned how to silence or soothe. Like it’s not something any god would understand. Like it’s not—

_Normal_.

But then, how would she know what ‘normal’ even means? It’s not like she ever—

She probably thinks the other stuff is normal. The scars and the nightmares, the lost memories and the ones she poured out into her journal, the drawings and the bloodstains and the violence.

Everything he hates about her, all those awful reminders of what happened to the world, everything that hurts and haunts and horrifies him, the damage he wrought with his selfishness and his stupidity. That is her normal.

But this? Typical god stuff, easily fixed with a good education? This makes her anxious, makes her duck her head and cringe and cower, like it’s something she should be ashamed of, like it’s—

Something to _hide_.

He closes his eyes.

He wonders if he could help. Probably not very much — experience proved that he lacks the makings of a Master — but a little, perhaps. Enough to take the edge of, make it a little less unbearable. He could take her somewhere quiet, talk her through some of the techniques the Master taught him, breathing and meditation and stillness, channel his lessons, his kindness and his patience, his—

_No._

He slams the door shut on that idea, smothers it before the pain grows too sharp.

When he summons the strength to glance back up, what feels like an eternity later, he finds her staring into the distance and fiddling absently with his scarf.

Her expression is sober now, and a little melancholy, like she knows she’s upset him again but has no idea how or why or what she did. If he was a better person, he might feel a bit bad about that; it’s not her fault that she’s a living breathing monument to everything that went wrong in the world, and it’s not her fault that he can’t deal with that. None of it is her fault, not a damn thing, and if he was slightly more well-adjusted than he is, maybe he’d take a moment to feel guilty about the sorrow on her face and the fact that he’s the one who put it there.

He does not feel guilty, however. He does not let himself feel guilty.

Instead, because he is not well-adjusted and he is definitely not a better person, he growls and snaps, “Will you stop messing around with that thing?”

Sandy freezes, fingers tense and stock-still over the golden fabric. “It keeps slipping.”

“Because you keep _touching_ it.” He doesn’t care nearly as much as he’s pretending to, but he needs to focus on something simple and mindless or else he’ll do something all four of them will regret. “It’s valuable. If you tear it, I _swear_...”

She scowls. It’s a small sort of comfort, seeing her dragged back to the present, watching her hazy, half-dead eyes sputter back into focus.

“If it means so much to you,” she pouts, “why don’t you just take it back?”

The answer is on the tip of his tongue, obvious and hellishly painful. _You know why: because I don’t want to see your stupid throat and its stupid bruises and all the stupid pain that I inflicted, that I made, that I caused..._

He wants to say it, tries to say it, but he can’t seem to push the words past his teeth. His mouth feels like it’s too full, like he’s been eating something sticky, and it’s suddenly a struggle just to try and say anything at all.

Peering at him, no doubt sensing the tension, Tripitaka presses, “Monkey?”

He probably doesn’t mean for it to sound as condescending as it does. He cares, he’s worried, he can see that Monkey isn’t happy and he wants to know if he can help; deep down, Monkey knows and understands this — deeper down, he’s maybe even a little bit touched — but that’s not enough to stop him from getting annoyed. It’s hard enough, trying to swallow his guilt and his grief, without the little human getting involved and making it even harder.

He is not proud of the way his temper flares, but he can’t bring himself to try and douse it, either.

“Fine!” he hears himself snarl, waving off the monk’s supportive gestures and glaring daggers at Sandy. “If it bothers you that much, take the stupid thing off. See if I care!”

Tripitaka recoils at his vehemence, but Sandy does not. No doubt she’s well accustomed to Monkey’s fickleness by now, and to him snapping at her, in particular, for no discernible reason. He might feel a little guilty about that too, hearing Pigsy’s accusations echo in his head — _you’re being an ass_ — but it’s hard to feel anything but nausea when she’s unwinding the scarf from around her neck and baring her bruised, staff-crushed throat for the whole damn world to see.

“For someone who doesn’t care,” she says blithely, “you’re certainly making a fuss about it.”

Pigsy snorts. “She’s got you, there.”

There are a few things Monkey could say to him, if he felt like it. _It’s none of your business_, for a start, or _shouldn’t you be cooking or something_, or any number of unsubtle ‘suggestions’ to butt out. He doesn’t say any of them, though, hardly sparing Pigsy a glance for his troubles.

He’s too busy staring at Sandy’s throat, trying to keep his breath from quickening, trying to keep his heart from hammering in his chest, the guilt like a dead weight pressing down on his lungs, his heart. He can’t see anything else, his whole field of vision filled with the mottled blue-black marks, the shape of his staff — barely recognisable, but he knows it — pressed into her skin like a brand, fading but still there.

His throat feels dry. He tries to swallow, and it hurts like razor-wire; his airway feels crushed and strained, as battered and brutalised as hers looks.

Sandy studies him, head tilted in her usual confused, cock-eyed manner, like she’s scrying for answers to a question no-one else can hear. Then, either finding them or simply giving up, she sighs and glides to her feet.

“I suppose,” she muses, seemingly to herself, “that I ought to wash this before returning it to you?”

“Why would you do that?” Pigsy remarks. “_He_ never washes his clothes.”

“Like you’re one to talk,” Monkey spits, then goes back to glaring at Sandy. “Knock yourself out.”

She’s a little wobbly as she moves off, like she’s readjusting to not having it around her neck. Like it took so much effort just to keep the stupid thing in place. There’s a few things Monkey could say about that, too, but he won’t. Mostly because he’s too damn tired.

“You don’t have to do it now,” Tripitaka says, looking more than a little worn out himself. “Surely it can wait until after lunch?”

“Of course it can,” Sandy replies, not slowing her pace at all. “But I’m sure lunch will be equally content to wait for me. And then the task will be done.”

Pigsy huffs his disgust at that. “Well, _I’m_ not waiting for you,” he gripes, looking thoroughly affronted. “If you’re not back by the time it’s cooked, I make no promises that there’ll be anything left for you.”

The impressive pile of rabbits at his feet might suggest that this is hyperbole. Monkey’s knowledge of Pigsy’s appetite says that it is not.

Whether she believes the threat or not, Sandy doesn’t bother to reply. She just shoots a withering look at Pigsy, an apologetic one at Tripitaka, and disappears without looking at Monkey at all.

*

To absolutely no-one’s surprise, she does not return in time for lunch.

None of them even pretend they expected anything different. Sandy has a tendency to wander off by herself, either because she needs to be alone for a while or simply by getting lost in her meandering thoughts; her body seems to move independently of her mind — what little is left of it — and she often needs herding back to camp like a wayward sheep. This is not the first time she’s lost track of time, and none of them are naïve enough to hope it will be the last.

Still, by the time he’s devoured the last of his hard-won meal, Monkey’s patience — hardly a limitless thing, even when he’s dealing with more pleasant things — is beginning to fray.

“I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Pigsy grunts. “We’ve been stuck in worse places than this, for worse reasons than an impromptu laundry session. Right?”

Monkey, thinking of Locke’s prison and the particular part that Pigsy played in that, neglects to comment on that.

“Go and bring her back,” he says to Tripitaka, folding his arms.

Tripitaka, sprawled out on his back in the grass and looking entirely too comfortable, doesn’t even open his eyes.

“If you’re that desperate to see her again,” he remarks mildly, “maybe you should go and bring her back yourself.”

Monkey’s temper flares. They’ve not been travelling together for very long, but he’s already had more than he can stand of the monk’s ‘patience and compassion and serenity’ rubbish. It grates along his nerves, making him more annoyed than he already is, making him want to do something he’ll certainly regret; it’s intense enough that he actually starts to think chasing after Sandy isn’t such a bad idea, if only because it’ll stop him from taking a swing at Tripitaka instead.

“You’re the only one she’ll listen to,” he points out.

Half-hearted though it is, it’s also true, and he suspects Tripitaka is more flattered by that than he’d caret o admit. His lips lift just a bit, with that maddening fondness of his, but he still doesn’t move.

“Well, then,” he says serenely, “consider it a test of your talents.”

Monkey, already halfway to the edge of their camp, does not point out that his talents don’t need testing, that they’re flawless enough already.

He has a feeling he knows what Tripitaka would have to say to that.

*

He finds her, as he knew he would, in the river.

His scarf, he finds draped over the branch of a nearby tree, sodden but clean. Her clothes lie in a haphazard pile under the same tree, thrown off and discarded without thought; tension coils in his belly at the sight of them, and the realisation that he might have to see her without them again, exposed and uncovered and vulnerable, her scars and her hunger all on display, mocking him, taunting him, _judging_ him—

He nearly turns around and runs back to camp right then and there. Let Pigsy and Tripitaka roll their eyes if they like; the derision would be a small price to pay for not having to see that again.

He swallows down the temptation, though, and straightens his spine. If there’s one thing he’s not — or so he tells himself, in his arrogance and pride — it’s a coward. It doesn’t matter what he’s feeling or what he wants to do; it doesn’t matter that even just the thought of looking at her makes him want to scream or cry or summon his cloud and fly to the ends of the world. He will not run from the things that frighten him, not any more.

She’s standing chest-deep in the river when he spots her, right in the middle where the water runs quickest, as still and immovable as stone. Her eyes are closed, her breathing slow and steady and unexpectedly rhythmic; he doesn’t need to get closer to realise that she’s trying to meditate, to focus her thoughts and her body, no doubt to try and silence the voices she claims to hear in the water. Like this has become a point of pride for her or something, like she really thinks he’d care if she can do it or not.

From the look of her, he doubts she’ll find much success. She’s trying to hold herself in a state of relaxation, but there’s too much tension in her body, the rippling, juddering lines of someone who has never been able to let her guard down completely. Not much opportunity for quiet reflection, he supposes, in the cold and dark of the sewers, hunted and hiding and hungry. He wonders what the Master would say, if he were here to see her.

No. He _knows_ what the Master would say.

“Your breathing’s all wrong.”

Her body goes rigid, but she doesn’t turn around “It’s rude to enter without knocking.”

He snorts, rapping his knuckles on the trunk of the tree just to humour her. “Better?”

“Hmph.”

The sullenness amuses him, rather more than he’d care to admit. He doesn’t wait for an invitation to approach, but he does move slowly and carefully, giving her plenty of time to flee or attack, or do whatever else she wants. She doesn’t move, holding perfectly still in that paralysed, trapped-animal state that hits her every now and then, but she doesn’t tense any more than she already is; he considers that a win and, casting aside his own clothes, he sloshes into the river to join her.

She holds herself still as he approaches, visibly resisting the instinct to flinch, to recoil, to _run_.

He gets that. He really, really does: moving closer, watching as the lines of her body come into better focus, it takes every ounce of self-control he has not to do the same.

It’s so much worse, up close. As he moves in, he can see every mark on her body, natural or otherwise, and it almost drives him to his knees. He can make out the keen lines of stab-wounds, the rippled streaks of burns from heat and cold, the jagged edges of animal teeth and claws. He can see her bones, the jutting angles of her shoulders, the curve of her ribs; he can see her spine, as well, and the point a little to the left, terrifyingly close, where a blade found its mark. Half a breath to the right, and even a god would have been paralysed.

He shudders.

The water ripples, as though responding to his distress; she reacts, sensing it, but still doesn’t move. Monkey shuts his eyes, blocking out the sight of her, and forces himself to close the last bit of distance remaining between them.

“You’re doing it wrong,” he says again, stopping about a hand’s span behind her. Eyes still shut, he pictures the Master’s face and draws strength from his smile. “You’re too tense, too agitated.”

She tenses even more, hearing it said, tangibly discomfited by the close proximity; her skin seems to vibrate with nervousness, her muscles locked tight and visible under the ash-white surface.

“You...” She swallows, breath growing shallow. “What?”

“Take it easy.”

Still, he’s very careful when he leans in to touch her. He moves with painful slowness, giving her ample warning before he makes contact, all the time she could possibly want to retreat or to lash out, to do whatever she wants or needs to do to feel safe. He’s not used to taking these kinds of experiences into account, her lack of social awareness, the natural association of contact with violence, the tiny tremors rocking her frame.

A trapped animal, right down to her bones. There are few things more pitiful, Monkey knows, and few more dangerous, and so he treads lightly and moves with care.

The gentleness must seem as strange to her as it feels to him, but she doesn’t acknowledge it. She doesn’t retreat, either, though, and he knows this time that it must be an invitation; he’s given her what feels like a decade to push him away or to run, but still she doesn’t move.

So he does. Hands on her sides, he presses down on the space between her ribs, feather-light but instructive, encouraging the motion needed for easy, even breathing.

“What are you doing?” She doesn’t flinch, but her voice pitches sharply. Her ribs spread wide under his hands; behind them, he can feel the stuttering staccato of her heartbeat, as delicate and fragile as his touches. “Why?”

“Because you’re making a mess of it.” True enough. He repositions his fingers to accommodate the shallowness of her breath, its rapidity, the reverberating thrum of panic. “Slower. More space between breaths. You’ll hyperventilate if you keep doing it like this.”

“You don’t...” She wets her lips. “You don’t even know what I—”

“Sure I do.” His grin is characteristically cocky; he knows she can’t see it, but wearing it makes him feel more like himself, powerful and untouchable and brilliant. “You’re trying to block them out, right? The fish-voices?”

Her whine is comical. “How could you possibly know that?”

It’s a good question, but not one he wants to answer.

“We don’t have much in common,” he says. “But this, I get.”

She doesn’t understand. He knows that even before she confirms it, voice trembling a little, like she wants so desperately to believe him but can’t.

“You can block them out,” she says. “Silence them. You can’t possibly understand what it’s like to—”

“Not that.” He doesn’t mean to sound so rough, but for once it doesn’t make her flinch; perhaps she can sense, through the points of contact, that it wasn’t intentional this time. “I mean, I know what it’s like to feel stupid and helpless because you can’t do something that should be simple.”

Under his hands, her breath stops. “Do you?”

Monkey swallows. He thinks of his cloud, still stubbornly ignoring his calls, his pleas, his prayers, and he looks down at her body and follows the path from her shoulder to her ribs, gaze tripping over the scars and lines that block his way. The tension in her is so, so familiar — determination, hunger, the desire to be better, to be stronger, to be _more_ — and for the first time the ache in his chest comes with something a little warmer.

“Yeah,” he says, as breathless as she is. “I know how it feels to want to do something you can’t. To want to make things easier, both for yourself and for your...” He pauses, clearing his throat; he won’t give her the satisfaction of saying ‘friends’. “For the people who are stuck with you. And, believe it or not, I _really_ get how it feels to not want to be a—”

_No_.

If he won’t say ‘friend’, he certainly won’t say ‘burden’.

She may be, but he is not.

He is the Monkey King. He will never be a burden, not to anyone. He will _never_—

“Uh.” Sandy’s breath is still shaky, but it’s much stronger now; she’s heeding his instructions, more or less, leaving space between the _in_ and _out_, finding and sustaining a rhythm, working with her body instead of against it. It’s good work, he notes approvingly. “That’s new.”

“Right.” He refuses to smile, but a part of him lights up just the same. “Keep it slow, just like that. Hold between breaths and—”

“Not _that_.” She turns her upper body slightly, facing him with cloudy, confused eyes. “You, trying to understand me. Trying to...” Her throat convulses; the bruises jump against her pulse-point. “Trying to _connect_.”

This time, he’s the one who tenses.

He doesn’t mean to, but there it is: a spark of lightning under his hand, igniting as his fingertips brush across one of her scars or the jutting curve of a bone, a reminder of why he kept his distance in the first place, why this — failure, frustration, the desperate need to be better — is the only part of her he _can_ connect with. He can feel all the ruined parts of her under his hands, vivid and visceral and awful, and he is struck by a sudden half-mad urge to dig his fingers in and tear all of those wrecked pieces apart.

He lets go, shaken by the unwanted impulse, and steps hastily back. It’s harder than it should be, forcing his legs to move, and he lets himself pretend it’s because of the pressure in the river, the rushing ripples and little waves shoving and tugging on him from every direction.

“Stop distracting me,” he says.

Her shoulders twitch. “Was I?”

He doesn’t answer, of course. Instead, characteristically stubborn, he deflects. “Do you want me to teach you to do this right, or not?”

Sandy doesn’t answer for a long time. She stands there motionless, exactly as she was, breathing the way he tried to show her, slower than before, steadier, more even, holding for a beat or two longer between each breath. She really is a quick study, he notes; between her natural talent and her eagerness to learn, it probably wouldn’t be too hard to teach her properly, this and any number of other godly gifts the world deprived her of the chance to learn.

He shakes off the thought immediately, of course, recognising it for the cock-eyed idealism it is. Even if she is a good student — and she clearly is — he’s doesn’t have what it takes to be a Master. Didn’t he prove that, beyond all doubt, back on Jade Mountain?

Moving slowly, cutting off his thoughts before they can get too dark, Sandy turns to frown at him. She’s still controlling her breathing, but it’s quickening again now, like she’s fighting off some deep, powerful emotion.

“I don’t understand,” she says, in a very small voice.

Monkey snorts. He can’t help himself. “_Shocking_.”

Sandy ignores the jibe. She’s staring at him, blank and headachey, like she’s trying to piece together the secrets of the world, like she thinks she can split him wide open and put him back together in a way that makes more sense.

“Everything I am,” she says. ‘Everything about me bothers you. The way I speak, the way I smile, the things I feel and don’t feel. Everything. But this... this is the first part of me you’ve seen and not hated. And I don’t understand, because it is the one part of me that everyone... that _everyone_...” She trails off, biting down hard on her lip, then shakes her head and finishes breathlessly, “I don’t understand.”

Monkey doesn’t understand either.

“Because this is normal,” he explains, frowning. “It’s the first part of you that’s actually normal. I don’t—”

And then, as the words falter and die in his throat, he does.

Sandy looks absolutely devastated.

“No part of me is normal,” she whispers. “And _this_ is the most abnormal of all.”

Monkey’s chest aches. “That’s not—”

“Not for you, perhaps.” There is a strange sort of clarity in her eyes now, burning bright, and he has to look away or be caught in the inferno. “But you remember. What it was like to be one of many. To exist in a world where we... where _gods_ were everywhere. And perhaps this—” She taps the side of her head. “—was normal in your world, but it’s not in mine.”

The pain in Monkey’s chest gets worse. “I see.”

“Do you?” She has that look on her face again, the one that says she wants to believe him but can’t. “My whole life. All of it. Voices in my head, water in my lungs. Hearing and seeing and feeling things that didn’t exist. Wondering if I was going mad. Being told that I was something worse. Being punished, again and again and again, for things I could not control and did not understand.” Her eyes are wet, as clear as a starless sky, and when she taps her head again she does it with a closed fist. “_This_ is not normal, Monkey. And I don’t understand...”

She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t need to.

Monkey gets it now.

He wishes he didn’t, but he does. And now that he does, it’s like watching a grey wall flood with colour for the first time, like watching someone scribbling on a piece of parchment, the ink spreading, taking the shape of words, poetry and prose and promises, where just a moment before there was nothing at all.

“I...” He closes his eyes. It doesn’t help. “I’ve been an ass.”

Sandy is breathing raggedly again, all feints at steadiness long gone now. “I’m not normal in this world,” she whispers, “and I would not be normal in yours either. I can’t be the human they would have wanted—” The hitch in her voice suggests a very specific ‘they’, one that Monkey doesn’t want to know about. “—and I can’t be the god you think I should be. Accept that, or tell Tripitaka to send me on my way.”

Monkey takes no shame in considering that.

It would be so much easier if he did. Tripitaka might take a little time to get over it, enamoured as he is by his own personal fan club, but he’d understand eventually. And it would be so much easier to think about what needs doing, the stupid quest and his stupid journey of stupid redemption. So much easier to set to work fixing his mistakes without her there all the time, staring at him and smiling at him, reminding him—

Reminding him, with every step, just how far he still has to go.

He wants her gone. He wants to be able to breathe again, without guilt or shame or grief.

But he knows now, just as he knew before, what the Master would have to say about that.

_Life gives us what we need, Monkey, not what we want._

And apparently what he needs is a scarred, scrambled wreck of a god, a living testament to all his worst mistakes and all his darkest memories.

So he’s stuck with her. Stuck with her emptiness and her confusion, her blithe smiles and her vacant stares, the bruises on her neck and the dead stars in her eyes. Stuck with her ravaged body, the faded scars and the jutting bones, the visible wounds that haunt him during the day and the invisible ones that haunt her at night.

He opens his eyes. Presses his hands flat against his chest, and lets his ribs pull themselves apart, making room for more breath, more focus, more of everything. Making room for thought, for peace, for a little bit _hope_, just like the Master taught him all those years ago.

One breath. Two breaths. Three, and then he sloshes forwards and reaches for her again.

She’s staring at him, hollow-eyed and confused, like she’s not sure what she expects or wants, like maybe a part of her is secretly hoping he really will send her away, like maybe it would be easier for her, after all this time spent trying to make him see what she’s not, to go back to the place where she doesn’t have to try to be anything at all.

She flinches when he catches the curve of her ribs, but does not struggle or resist. _Trust_, he thinks, and wishes it didn’t mean as much to him as it does. He lets it settle, the contact and the connection, and then he turns her back around, moving her body in rhythm with his slow, steady breathing, reminding her — and reminding himself a little bit, too — of why they’re here.

“Stop talking,” he says, to both of them, “and let’s try this again.”

*


	4. Chapter 4

*

She is not the only one who has nightmares that night.

Monkey wakes to absolute darkness, choking on his breath, heart thundering against his ribs. In his mind’s eye, he sees the Master’s face, the life bleeding out of him bit by bit, the sorrow in his eyes fading to emptiness, blank and cold and hollow. No peace, not in this version of the story. No hope, no patience, no quiet acceptance; in Monkey’s dreams, the Master dies in agony, hating and resenting him.

_I’m disappointed in you_, he doesn’t say — didn’t say — but Monkey hears it, as loud as a scream.

He’s been hearing it ever since he came out of the rock. Ever since he woke from a five-hundred year nap and discovered what the world had become without him. Ever since he turned his gaze to the horizon to search for his fellow gods and found only holes in the ground where their bodies were once laid to rest. Ever since he got stuck in a prison cell with a confused, dead-eyed shell of a god who smiled at the wall and told him that she’d spent her whole life hiding. Ever since he saw the evidence on her body of what happened if she failed to hide well enough.

He shakes off the memory, the vision still clinging to his eyelids, the voice in his ear that he both loves and fears. He doesn’t know if he will ever be free of it, the false memory that come to him at night, and the fear that lingers on waking: _what if it wasn’t so false after all?_

Shaking all over he turns, seeking out Sandy’s sleeping form in the darkness, knowing what he’ll find even before his eyes adjust and let him see it. Pain always finds its own kind, and his finds hers by instinct: vision clearing, he makes out her huddled form, curled up and shivering, her whimpering cries as piercing and painful as the Master’s dying words.

For the second night in a row, he finds himself by her side, but this time he makes the move by choice.

Maybe he feels a connection with the shudders wracking her body, her cries a twisted echo of the ones still ringing in his head. She looks so much like he still feels, it’s almost visceral to look directly at her. The sweat beading on her brow makes him tug at his tunic, clinging stickily to his skin, makes him push his wet hair back from his face; the high-pitched cries caught in her throat make him cough and swallow, trying to dislodge the ones in his own. The way she shudders and shivers, trapped by her own demons, makes him wish someone had reached out to wake him when he was doing the same.

He can’t just let her drown in there. He can’t—

He _won’t_.

He shakes her roughly, urgently, and this time he is unsurprised by the way she jerks back to consciousness, the way she looks around herself, disoriented and dizzy and characteristically confused.

“Mm?” Her voice is thick, like she’s been swallowing screams or sobs. Monkey’s hands twitch, wishing he had a waterskin or something to offer, anything that might help to chase away the hoarseness so at odds with her smile. “My turn to stand watch again?”

He starts to nod, but the lie doesn’t come as easily now as it did last night. He can still taste his own pain, the loss and grief and horror; selfishly, perhaps a little cruelly, he doesn’t want to be the only one out here tonight feeling lost and alone.

“No,” he says, and instantly hates himself.

“Oh.” She furrows her brow. Trying to frown, he guesses, but apparently half her motor skills are still asleep. “Then what?”

“Uh.” He winces, then straightens his spine and his resolve; he won’t back out now. “You were dreaming.”

“I was?” The confusion does not fade; in fact, he’s pretty sure it gets worse. “Loudly, I suppose? Was I disturbing your sleep?”

Monkey grinds his teeth, grappling briefly with what he wants to say and what he really, really doesn’t.

“You... uh, not exactly?”

It sounds stupid, like he’s somehow unsure, like it’s possible to be unsure of such a thing. Maybe it is for her, who can’t tell up from down even when she’s wide awake, but he is nothing like her and he can’t pretend that he doesn’t know whether or not her dreams woke him up. He feels stupid and uncomfortable, and it doesn’t help at all that she’s staring at some odd point on his collarbones and seeming to think that’s where his eyes are.

“I see,” she says to his tunic. “Well, if I did, I apologise. And if I didn’t...” She frowns again, only slightly less confused. “Well, I’m sure you had a good reason for for waking me, even if I didn’t. Yes?”

He’s prepared, this time, for the disorientation and the grogginess, the inability to remember, but it’s no less unpleasant. Worse, in a way, because this time he had dreams too and he doesn’t have the luxury of being able to forget their contents.

“Nightmares,” he tells her, voice tight and shaky. “You were having nightmares. I woke you up because you were having nightmares.”

“I was?” She blinks a few times, like she still doesn’t understand, even after hearing the word three separate times. “Are you sure?”

For the first time since they met, the anger that flares in his chest has nothing to do with horror and everything to do with jealousy. 

There is very little to envy in a god like Sandy, and less with each new hell he uncovers, but in this he finds he would give anything to switch places with her. He hates her confusion, her vagueness, the way she’s always so empty and so lost... but here and now, in this, it serves her very well.

He remembers his nightmare. He remembers watching as the Master’s face twisted with resentment, with disappointment, as the life bled out of him and he found no peace. He remembers the sweetness in his voice growing sour as he turned his face away, letting Monkey know in no uncertain terms that there was no place for him at his side, even in his final moments. He remembers feeling the impossible weight of it, the judgement of a hellish new world bearing down on his shoulders, reflected in the eyes of the only person who ever meant anything to him. He remembers it all, the truth distorted by his fears, made sharper, keener, more cruel, and he wishes he could drown it as easily as Sandy seems to have drowned hers.

He does not want to be like her. He couldn’t live the way she has, the way she still does. But _oh_, what he wouldn’t give to forget his nightmares as easily as she can.

“You really don’t remember?” he asks in a whisper.

She wets her lips. Under the wan moonlight, her skin is even paler than usual; its eerie translucency makes her look a little feverish, the dark bruises on her neck standing out stark and strong. Her brow is still damp with sweat, though she doesn’t seem to notice; it makes his own skin itch a little to look at her, and he swipes moodily at his face, scrubbing away the lingering evidence of his own dreams, if not the memories themselves.

“I’ve forgotten many things,” Sandy murmurs, almost to herself. “If my nightmares are among them, I can’t say I’m particularly sorry.”

He can’t blame her for that, but it does little to balm his irritation.

“You’re not going to be any use to us,” he says, flat and admittedly rather unfair, “if you keep forgetting things.”

She flinches. Badly. Like he’s just reared back and struck her across the face. Like he just whipped out his staff and knocked her down, shoving the edge against her throat again, driving it up against her pulse, her—

“I won’t forget the things that matter,” she says, sounding just as ragged now as she did then. “Not the quest. Not _Tripitaka_. I will not!”

“Okay.” He closes his eyes, trying to block out the darker, more recent memory. “Okay.”

But she’s not done. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve held his name inside my head? Do you have any idea how much it means to me? How much _he_...”

She trails off, shaking her head, as though realising how close she is to getting upset, to actually getting angry.

Monkey studies her closely in the moonlight. Her chest is heaving, her breathing shallow but very rapid; she looks like she’s on the brink of a panic attack, but he can’t guess at why; he wonders if maybe she doesn’t fully know either. A part of him wants to sneer at her for that, to shove her away or turn his back on her, anything that might give him a little distance from the horrors he can see glittering behind her eyes, the horrors that she herself can’t seem to see or feel or reach at all.

He doesn’t, though.

As much as he hates the nightmares he sees in her — and he hates them all the more because she doesn’t see them in herself — it is so much safer to look at hers than to go back to sleep and have to live through his own.

“You remember him,” he presses, “but not this?”

She shrugs. “Apparently.”

Her ambivalence only irks him more. “So you just... what? Pick and choose the stuff you remember and the stuff you don’t?”

“No.”

The word sort of splits itself in two, like she’s trying to keep herself from crying. He watches the bruises twitch as she swallows over them, then tears his gaze away when his own throat starts to ache in sympathy.

“Go on,” he presses, choking down the discomfort until it sinks down into his chest, then lower, to his stomach.

She squints at him for a few moments, as though to try and gauge his willingness to listen, then bites down on her lip and composes herself again.

“There are thousands of nightmares inside my head,” she explains in a hushed voice. “Thousands of dark places. So many shadows, so many threats and dangers, so many wounds I can’t tell one from another. They all look the same, they all feel the same, they all _hurt_ the same. Easy to forget them when there's so many, and all so alike. You see?”

He doesn’t. “You’re talking in stupid metaphors,” he says, though he’s not entirely sure she realises it. “How is _anyone_ supposed to see?”

To her credit, her sigh is one of weariness, not frustration; biting her lip, she tries again. “When the cold and the dark are the only things you know, you forget the parts that make them. All the separate little parts and pieces, the nightmares and the shadows and the wounds, you don’t have room for all that. It’s just _dark_ and _cold_ and it _hurts_, and that is how you live.”

Well, that’s certainly less abstract. It’s so visceral it almost makes his veins freeze. He’s not sure it helps, but it certainly makes him think.

And feel.

He closes his eyes and sees the Master’s face once more. Not as it was in his nightmare, twisted by death and disappointment, but as it was in life, as he was in truth: vibrant and warm and full of hope. Somehow, in a moment as raw as this, the truth almost hurts more than the nightmare did, the lump in his throat growing bigger and bigger until he almost can’t bear it. 

It overwhelms him for a moment, the pain so powerful, the grief so complete, that when he opens his eyes again and finds hers, pale and hollow and almost glowing in the darkness, he actually finds a kind of quiet comfort in their dead-star emptiness.

“You don’t recall every tree in a vast forest,” he recalls, feeling the Master’s wisdom take shape on his tongue.

Sandy lights up, nodding feverishly. She looks so excited, thrilled that for once he actually understands the rubbish she’s spouting; he doesn’t have the strength to tell her that the words weren't his.

“Yes,” she cries, exuberant. “Yes, exactly! You don’t...” She slows her breathing, seemingly trying to calm down for his sake. “It’s too much, all the same. The world is dark, it is cold, it hurts. You can’t fit more than that inside you. Too many details all at once, you go mad, your head hurts, it’s awful. But when—”

She stops. The hitch in her breath is so sharp, so jagged, it makes him flinch a little too. “When what?”

Sandy makes a distressed, heartbroken sound. For a moment, he thinks she’s going to leave it there, too broken to continue, but then she recovers herself, swallows a couple of times, and presses on in a reverent whisper.

“It’s the light you remember,” she says tearfully. “When you see a place that is light... a place that is warm and safe, a place that isn’t dark and doesn’t hurt...” She whimpers, nothing at all like the sounds she made in her dreams, and squints through the shadows. Monkey doesn’t need to follow her gaze to know that she’s searching for Tripitaka, his lean figure standing watch some distance away. “That place, you remember. That place, you will never, ever forget.”

The tears in her eyes are visible when she turns back to him, burning brighter than he’s ever seen them. The dead stars seem to come alive in the moonlight, reignited and brought back from the brink by the depth of her emotions, the awe and love and devotion she feels when she looks at Tripitaka; Monkey doesn’t know what she sees in him, but it must be unfathomably beautiful because the look on her face is radiant.

There is life in her after all, he realises. Only the faintest flicker, a candle-flame wavering in the midst of a hurricane, but it is there and it is real.

“He’s human,” he reminds them both, cutting the moment apart. “You’re a god. It’s not right for a god to dedicate her whole life to a human.”

Sandy peers at him curiously, trying to make the words fit into her narrow, confused worldview. Her eyes grow distant and unfocused again, like she can’t really keep herself tethered any more, like staring at Tripitaka was the only thing holding her to the ground. No surprise, there, Monkey thinks sadly; it usually is.

“Not a human,” she says, blinking rapidly. The tears don’t vanish completely, but they fade just enough that he can pretend he doesn’t see them any more. “What he represents. _Hope_, Monkey. A light in the dark, a blanket against the cold, a balm for the hurt. _Hope_.”

The word makes him think of the Master. It meant so much to him; Monkey never really understood why until now. “Hope.”

Sandy nods, still fervent and feverish. “There are many gods in this world who have never known such a thing, and so many who never will. That I was gifted with it... to have a purpose, a reason to live...”

She doesn’t finish, but he hears the words just as well: _I’m one of the lucky ones_.

It is a sober, sickening thought, and it makes him shudder right down to his bones. The idea that there might be other gods out there, even worse off than her, just as scarred and helpless and ravaged, just as lifeless but somehow _worse_...

“I hate this world,” he mutters.

He hates himself, too, deeper and deeper the more he thinks about it, but Sandy doesn’t need to know that part. None of them do, not even Tripitaka.

Still studying him, Sandy cocks her head. “Is that what you dream of,” she wonders, “when you have your nightmares?”

He’s got a hand raised before he even realises it, lashing out too fast to stop himself. _Anger_, so sudden and so powerful that it blinds him, and there’s nothing he can do to hold it back, to slow his fist as it flies towards her face, nothing he can do but gasp when she blocks without thought, the impact of bone on bone jolting through them both.

“That’s none of your business,” he rasps, and does not apologise.

Sandy lowers her arms very slowly, eyes narrowing and darkening with understandable caution. They’re unfocused, distant like they always are, but she keeps them trained on his knuckles, like a part of her expects him to strike again, like maybe a part of her understands better than he does why he did it in the first place. He resents her a little for that; he has no idea, really, where it came from, only that it filled him completely, blinding, world-breaking hatred for someone who would dare to try and call him out on his nightmares when she can’t even hold on to her own.

“You’re very sensitive about your dreams,” she observes, and the anger surges again.

“No, I’m not.” It’s little more than a growl, low and very dangerous, but at least he doesn’t try to strike her this time. “It’s just none of your business.”

“Oh?” She inches back a little, ducking out of reach in case his wavering control dissolves completely. “And if I could remember my nightmares, I suppose they would have been none of your business too?” She raises a brow, still uneasy but shifting now into that unhinged, challenging sort of playfulness that strikes her every now and then. “You wouldn’t have asked about them, if I’d told you I remembered? You wouldn’t have wondered, even just a little, what sorts of monsters make their home in my head?”

“Of course not.”

Too quick, too shaky, and she knows it. She smiles, as vacant as always but a little sharper at the edges; it’s the same look she wore back in Locke’s prison, lost but somehow a little knowing.

“Liar.”

“I...” His arms are shaking, heavy with strain; he shoves them behind his back to keep them from doing something regrettable. “I don’t need to hear about your stupid nightmares. I’ve already seen them, remember? They’re printed all over your stupid body.”

The words are keen, and they hurt; she doesn’t flinch, but he does. Saying it makes him picture it all over again, the visceral vividness, faded scars and old wounds, the devastating thinness of her limbs, her torso, starvation and suffering and misery painted in broad, bloody brush-strokes all over her body. A whole world’s worth of pain burned onto her flesh like ink on a parchment, his terrible mistake and the havoc it wrought, the horrors — the nightmares — it rained down upon his kind.

_Their_ kind.

She is not like him, but they are the same. And her wounds are the wounds of all gods.

His arrogance hurt them all. His selfishness—

She’s staring at him again, head still cocked to one side, looking like a confused puppy; on Tripitaka, or even Pigsy, it might be amusing, but on her the expression transforms into something painful and pitiable.

“I think you’re more afraid of my nightmares than your own,” she says. “You go pale when you look at me.”

“That would be pointless,” he retorts, so defensive he’s sure it gives him away. “You don’t even remember them. Why should I—”

He stops, strangled. His voice catches, grief and guilt sticking to his tongue, squashing it silent, and suddenly he can’t seem to speak at all. The look on her face cuts right through him, delirium and dizziness and the distant cheerfulness of someone so damaged they can no longer see the wounds on their own ravaged body, someone so broken, so lost, so thoroughly destroyed by the world around her that she can no longer recognise it for the hell it is.

All that darkness carved out of her flesh, all that pain poured into her veins, and all she can see is—

_Tripitaka_.

Monkey finds his silhouette in the dark. Quiet and distant, leaning against a tree and watching the world go by. If he can hear their conversation, he gives no sign, but Monkey doubts he can; human ears are so weak.

Weak and stupid, he thinks with spite, just like the human himself. A cock-eyed optimist, Tripitaka, just like Sandy. Both of them idealists, both of them idiots, thinking they can save the world by walking from one end to the other, playing messenger to some mindless human resistance. Like anything has ever been so easily fixed. Like _this_, of all things, can be mended by words and faith and hope.

It makes him angry.

It makes him _ache_.

Someone has to remember the darkness, he thinks. Someone has to be able to see the threats hidden inside it.

He jolts, startled back to himself by the weight of Sandy’s hand on his arm.

“Monkey.” Her fingers tighten their grip, a strange sort of spasm that seems to come against her will. Tighter and tighter, until it’s almost painful. Her eyes, still vacant and full of dead stars, struggle in vain to lock with his. “I’m not so delicate as you think I am.”

“Well, _clearly_.” He glares, yanking his arm free before she can squeeze the life out of it. “You need to learn to control your strength.”

She stares at her hand, then at his arm, as though trying to figure out which one belongs to whom. “I need to learn to control many things,” she says, very quietly. “I think perhaps you do too.”

Well, maybe he does, at that.

His temper, for one. He might be arrogant, might be stubborn and proud and unwilling to admit he’s wrong, but even he can’t deny that it’s a problem. She pushes his buttons, brings out the worst of him, and he knows it’s not her fault; she is the fallout of his most stupid mistake, and that makes him angry, makes him say and do cruel, harmful things. He might be seeing her more clearly now, but that much hasn’t changed; even now, as civil as they’ve ever been to each other, he can feel it on the edge of his mind, pressing, pushing, bearing down, challenging him to snap, to break, to—

“Maybe,” he says tightly, and looks away.

A flicker of motion draws his attention to her hands. She has them folded in her lap now, fingers tangled together to try and hold them still, but they’re twitching like she wants to reach for him again. Like she’s a bit confused, herself, by the impulse.

Given or received, it seems it doesn’t matter: she’s still not used to physical contact as a gesture of comfort.

That makes his stomach clench. It makes him angry again, but it also makes him feel strangely, unexpectedly touched. He’s not worth being the reason she makes herself uncomfortable, but if his weakness can draw out something a bit more normal from those dead-star eyes and vacant smiles, well...

“I think,” she says to her hands, “we should both try and get some more sleep.”

Monkey doesn’t expect either one of them will have much luck with that, but he doesn’t point that out. It’s a good excuse to get some distance from her, to pretend he can just shut his eyes and block out his thoughts, to pretend the only nightmares he has to worry about are the ones inside their heads.

“Sure,” he says, also to her hands.

Still, she stops him before he can flee, grabbing his wrist with her usual uncontrolled strength and gazing up at him with wide eyes. She still can’t seem to find his, so she’s sort of staring at the crown on his head instead; it makes him feel oddly exposed, makes him remember the dank of the sewer, the fillet tightening around his temples and bringing him to his knees, the pain, the helplessness, the _pain_—

He wonders if the sight of it, still there, still stuck to him, makes her feel safer.

He wonders if it would make the stupid thing less heavy if she told him it did.

Her grip tightens. This time, he lets it happen.

“You shouldn’t be afraid of nightmares,” she tells him. “Yours or mine. They’re only dreams. They can’t do us any harm.”

Monkey sighs. He knows she means well, knows she’s trying to offer comfort as best she can, but it doesn’t help. It does the opposite of help; it makes his temper flare again, his patience fraying bit by bit until there’s nothing left of it at all.

“Easy for you to say,” he says, with quiet vehemence. “See if you still feel that way when you actually remember them.”

And with that, he wrenches free and stalks away.

*

The next time he wakes, it’s morning, Pigsy is grumbling, and Sandy is nowhere to be found.

Tripitaka, rather predictably, is fretting.

“You’d think she’d leave a note, at least,” he’s muttering to himself, pacing the length of their little camp and wringing his hands like a worried parent, like he thinks he can somehow drag her back by sheer force of will.

Monkey announces his wakefulness with a loud, intentionally obnoxious yawn.

“Did you check the river?” he asks, recalling yesterday’s misadventure.

“Of course I...” He trails off with an awkward cough. “I mean, I was _going_ to...”

“Uh huh.” Monkey yawns again. “Well, that’s where you’ll find her.”

He hopes that’ll be the end of the conversation, but it’s not. Pigsy, thereuntil content to let them carry on without him, lifts his head with a knowing smile. “And how would _you_ know that?”

Monkey clears his throat. “That’s none of your business.”

True enough; it’s not. But for once, he’s not just saying it to save face.

Sandy hasn’t actually asked him to keep her struggles private, but he’s pretty sure she’d want him to. She is ashamed and frustrated with herself, the perceived weakness in being unable to shut off the voices she hears in the water, and Monkey doesn’t need to understand her as well as he does — as well as he’s starting to, at least — to know that she wouldn’t want her precious monk to know that she’s having difficulty.

It’s stupid. He knows this, and he told her so.

But it’s not his place to tell the others as well.

Grumbling to himself as he sits up, Pigsy shoots Monkey a sly, calculating look. “If you’re so sure that’s where she is,” he says, predictably antagonistic, “why don’t you go and fetch her?”

Monkey bristles. “Maybe she wanted some privacy. You ever think about that?”

“Right.” The derision is not entirely undeserved. “She doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

Maybe not usually, but this is different. It’s not the same as bathing or washing his scarf. It’s personal, it’s private, and Monkey has no idea how to explain that without giving her away.

“Just leave it, will you?” he snaps, with feigned irritability. “So long as she’s not getting in trouble, what does it matter where she is? We’re not going anywhere until you’ve eaten half your weight in breakfast anyway, so who cares? Mind your own damn business for once.”

Pigsy makes a cynical noise, but seems content to let the matter go. Lazy in every aspect of his life, he lacks the energy and the inclination to follow through on an argument he wasn’t particularly invested in to begin with. So, instead of picking a fight with an obviously cranky Monkey King, he instead focuses his efforts on the laborious task of standing up and brushing the night’s accumulation of dirt and leaves off his clothes.

Tripitaka, being rather more shrewd, is studying Monkey very closely.

“You’re pretty defensive this morning,” he remarks.

“Privacy is important,” Monkey says with an effortful shrug. “You should know that better than anyone, eh, monk? You won’t even bathe with the rest of us, much less anything else.”

“That’s different!” He’s clearly scored a point, though; Tripitaka is flustered now, and sputtering. If Monkey’s temper wasn’t already frayed, he might have found the flush on the little monk’s cheeks somewhat endearing. “I have a sacred obligation to my order... that is, I don’t... look, stop conflating the issue!”

Monkey allows himself the tiniest smirk.

“Whatever,” he huffs, climbing to his feet and waving off the issue. “My point is, she doesn’t need you breathing down her neck while she’s trying to—” Both of his companions grow attentive as he cuts himself off, and he hastily backtracks. “I mean, uh, while she’s _bathing_. Or communing with the water. Or doing whatever other stupid stuff she does when she’s alone. Which I wouldn’t possibly know anything about, now, would I?”

They’re staring at him now, Pigsy with his mouth half-open, Tripitaka with narrowed eyes, curious and clever, like he’s trying to decipher some complex code.

“Monkey.” There is something like a command in his voice now. It makes Monkey bristle again. “Is there something going on that I need to know about?”

“Of course not!” Still, he’s smart enough to know when he’s been backed into a corner, and he handles it with his usual poise and grace. Namely by throwing up his hands as if he’s been accused of some heinous crime and glowering at Tripitaka like he’s personally responsible for every wrong the world has ever faced. “But, hey, if it means that much to you, I’ll go and get her.”

Tripitaka does a double-take. “You will?”

“Sure.” He’s not really sure how well he passes for casual, but so long as neither of them are rushing to cut him off he supposes it doesn’t matter. “Better me than one of you, right?”

Pigsy pricks up his ears at that. “Since _when_?”

Monkey, not wanting to open his mouth and risk doing more damage he already has, decides not to answer.

*

He finds her at the water’s edge.

Standing perfectly still, gazing down at the surface, she’s stripped down to her underthings but hasn’t left the shore. He wonders how long she’s been standing there, readying herself, steadying her breathing, trying to—

“Monkey.”

Her voice is heavy with tension, but her posture doesn’t change at all. Shoulders drawn back, spine bent backwards in a perfect arc, ribs spread so he can measure the space between them, the scars pulled taut, stretched, distended—

Monkey swallows hard.

“Tripitaka was worried about you.”

Sandy doesn’t visibly react, but he can sense her surprise; the water ripples a little in front of her, as if in response to her feelings.

“I left a note,” she says.

Recalling Tripitaka’s anxious fretting, Monkey frowns his confusion. “He didn’t find one. Where did you leave it, inside your head?”

“In my...” Her shoulders stiffen, as though with realisation. “...oh.”

_Ah_. Monkey rolls his eyes. “You wrote it in your stupid journal, didn’t you?”

She lets out a tiny whine. “I’m not used to other people needing to read what I write. I forgot, I...”

The shame makes her sound sort of strangled, voice pitching so sharply he’s almost relieved when she trails off without finishing. It’s so devastating that Monkey can’t bring himself to deliver the witty quips he’s been thinking up ever since he left camp. He sighs instead, looking everywhere except at the marks on her body — the trees, the holes and tears in her discarded clothes, the ripples on the water’s surface — and sits himself down a few paces behind her. The distance, he calculates carefully, for her sake and his own.

“Any luck?” he asks, keeping his voice even, conversational.

Sandy’s growl, primitive and guttural, effectively answers the question before she even opens her mouth.

“I’ve been breathing,” she says, sounding sulky. “Exactly like you showed me.”

“That’s good.” He’s not really sure why, but something in her voice and her posture tells him that he should be very wary. “Uh... well done?”

She whirls around, glaring at him with heat behind her eyes. Not quite anger, at least not really, but something just as passionate: frustration, with him and with herself. A part of him expects to feel slighted by that, defensive like he always gets when someone accuses him of something, but this time the feeling doesn’t come. For the first time since they met, he thinks he might actually recognise something like a god in the pale water of her eyes; for that, he will take the glare, even if it is misplaced.

“Clearly,” she spits at him, “you are a terrible teacher who should never be tasked with instructing anyone to do anything.”

Monkey, for all his good intentions, has no idea how to respond to that.

“I... what?”

“I’ve been breathing _exactly_ like you showed me,” she says again, like the repetition is supposed to make it mean something new. “And I can still hear them.”

This clarifies things not one bit.

“Breathing’s only the start,” he explains, with the care of someone handling a wild, wounded animal. “You know that, right? You don’t just breathe and magically block it all out. You breathe to prepare yourself. Then you meditate, you focus, you—”

He stops, finding himself suddenly at eye-level with one of the scars on her hips, pale and quivering as she lurches up onto her feet and points a furious, accusatory finger at him.

“You didn’t tell me that part!”

“I didn’t think I needed to,” he says slowly. “I figured it was obvious.”

This, he realises too late, was a terrible mistake.

She gestures at herself, trembling all over. “I’ve been trying for _hours_!”

Her agitation is a striking contrast to the emptiness and confusion he’s used to, the giddiness and the vacant smiles and the dead stars; it throws him, leaves him floundering, and once again he finds he doesn’t know what to say.

It would be entirely too easy to call her stupid for failing to realise something so simple; it is, after all, one of the fundamental parts of being a god. But with no education, no experience, no-one to explain even the most basic, rudimentary facts about herself, how in the world could she have known?

Suddenly, he feels like he’s the stupid one. He does not like that feeling at all.

“It’s not just breathing,” he says again, as close to apologetic as he can get. “The breathing is just to help you focus. It’s about concentration. Discipline. Shutting off the places in your head where you hear these things. Keeping them out, even when they’re scratching at the walls of your mind. It’s a whole process. It’s not...” He wrings his hands. “It’s not just breathing.”

“I see.” She looks heartbroken and humiliated. “How was I supposed to know?”

“You weren’t.” He sighs. “You’re right, I should’ve explained it better. But I’m bad at this, okay?”

“Yes,” she says, deadpan but still a little downcast. “You are _very_ bad at this.”

He lets that slide; even he has to admit he’s earned it. “You need to learn properly,” he explains. “You can’t just master it in an hour because some idiot in a crown showed you how to breathe.”

He doesn’t really realise he’s started doing it himself, falling into the calm meditative state the Master taught him, eyes closed and breathing steady, body still and mind empty, listening to his own words echoing, grounding and tethering him to what he needs.

It was so stupid, he remembers, so pointless; he hated learning this stuff back then nearly as much as he hates trying to explain it now, but after spending some time with Sandy, who can do nothing and understands even less, he thinks he understands for the first time what a blessing, what an _honour_ it was to be able to learn.

The pain cuts through his focus, shattering it like glass. He blinks his eyes open, and finds her staring at him, looking as tearful and fragile as he feels.

“I was trying to hunt breakfast,” she mumbles. “Fish, like you wanted yesterday. But I still can’t make them go away, I still can’t make them stop _screaming_—”

Monkey turns his face away as she breaks off, clutching her temples, features crumpling with distress, like she’s stuck in some old, terrible memory.

It makes him ache deep in his chest, the sound she makes, the look on her face; he thinks he’s starting to understand what sort of pain a god might feel, that her own wounds and scars and nightmares might not seem so terrible. To be unable to block out the voices of the spirits around her, hundreds of them, thousands, endless and unstoppable, to have to listen to the screams of her meals as she hunts and stalks and kills, to hear their death-cries echoing in her head as she devours their bodies, their fear and pain and horror, their—

_Nightmares_.

Were they her cries, he wonders now, or theirs? Her whimpers, her screams, her sobs? Whose pain was it really, that vanished so conveniently the moment she woke?

He doesn’t want to know. It won’t hurt less either way.

“We don’t need fish,” he tells her, in a cracking, tremulous voice. “We’ve got enough rabbits left over from last night.”

“I know that,” she says, with quiet stubbornness. “But I wanted to try. I wanted...”

She doesn’t finish. It doesn’t matter; she doesn’t need to. He knows what she wanted to do, and the intimacy of it burns, a fire blazing and bursting to life inside his chest; it feels like a supernova, a cataclysm millions of millions of miles away, like how he imagines the dead stars in her eyes must have looked once, all those years ago, before the world snuffed them out and turned them to ice and bones.

“You wanted to prove you could,” he whispers, and he thinks of his cloud, his angry, stubborn cloud, and he feels so small in this world that hates him so much it won’t let him leave it. “Prove you were more than...”

He doesn’t finish. He can’t. Not without brushing too close to his own pain.

He shakes his head instead, and watches in silence as she lifts a hand, pressing two fingers to the side of her neck. The bruises on her throat distort and shift, but she doesn’t seem to feel them at all; eyes shut tight, breathing shallow and rapid, she holds her fingers still, counting the beats of her pulse as if to remind herself that she’s still alive.

Monkey can’t stop staring at the bruises. He can’t—

“I don’t like the way you look at me,” Sandy says.

The bruises jump under her fingertips. Monkey swallows, imagining how it would feel if he were bruised too, if she lost control of her strength again and did to him what he did to her.

“Dunno what you’re talking about,” he lies.

She opens her eyes, lips lifting in a cynical half-smile. “You’re doing it now.”

He ducks his head. “Am not.”

Apparently she’s in no mood for games this time, because she only sighs.

“I don’t like the way you look at me,” she says again. “The things you see in me, whether they’re really there or not. The things you think I should feel, the things I make _you_ feel.” She withdraws her hand, leaving ice-white prints on her neck. Monkey wills himself not to stare again. “I don’t like those things, Monkey. I don’t want to _be_ those things. I don’t want to have to cover up my throat or my body because it hurts you to look at me. I don’t...” Her voice cracks, but she doesn’t stop. “I have spent my whole life hiding from enemies. For the first time in my life, I have friends. I don’t want to have to hide from them as well.”

Monkey, still trying not to stare, remembers the hollow, cheerful way she dismissed the bruises, the damage, the almost-death the way she insisted on calling it ‘mark of friendship’, a wound made into a gift. It hurt before, when he didn’t understand her, and it hurts again, far worse, now that he finally does.

“It’s not...” The words are heavy on his tongue, acid-tasting and too thick to swallow back down; once he starts, he has to finish. “It’s not your fault.”

_It’s mine,_ he doesn’t say. _All of it. Your scars, your nightmares, your voices. This whole world is my fault._

She studies him, thoughtful and sad and halfway lost. “I have enough pain in me,” she says in a low, ragged whisper. “I don’t want it spilling out and hurting you too. I thought if I could control _this_, maybe I could...”

She shakes her head, leaving the rest unsaid. Like she realises it’s stupid, like she knows — hard as it is to admit —these things don’t work that way. Like she understands, in her confused, broken way, much more than he does.

Monkey thinks again of the Master, of his calm and quiet acceptance, his certainty that life only ever gave him what it knew he needed. He never balked at the unfair hand he was dealt; even in his dying moments he met his fate with open eyes and an open heart. While Monkey sobbed and pleaded and prayed selfishly for him to live, to survive, to take him back to the way things were, the Master merely smiled and told him what was needed.

He wouldn’t balk here either. Monkey knows that as well as he knows his own name.

He doesn’t know if he has the same strength in himself, though. He doesn’t know— 

He looks up at Sandy, wild-eyed and hopeful, and sighs.

“I have failed you.”

Of all the Master’s teachings, all his offerings of wisdom and experience and encouragement, these were not the words he would have ever expected to repeat. But here he is, and he finds they are the truest of them all.

Sandy is frowning. For once, her confusion is understandable.

“You blame yourself for things you had no hand in,” she says.

“I _did_.”

He surges up onto his feet, and his hands take on a life of their own, pushing and shoving at her body, poking at the long-healed scars on her body, the burns and the blades and the blisters, the hundreds and thousands of other horrors that tore her apart and made their homes in her.

She stands there, still frowning, and lets it happen. “I don’t understand.”

“All of this.” Each word, he punctuates with a finger pressed to one of her scars, one of her old wounds, one of her nightmares. “All of it. Everything that ever happened to you. It’s all my fault. The world is what it is because of me. You are what you are because of me. You really expect me to look at you and not hurt, when I’m the reason why...”

The words sputter out, his strength fading with them, and when she finally finds enough of her own to push him away, he doesn’t retaliate.

She wraps her arms around herself, seemingly aware for the first time that she’s still undressed, that she has been probably for a long time, but she makes no move to reclaim her clothes or put any space between them.

“The world is what it is,” she tells him, with a strange, unnatural sort of calm. “It doesn’t matter why. All that matters is that you were brought here to help fix—”

But she doesn’t seem able to say ‘it’, and he doesn’t think the world is what she’s thinking of when she turns to stare at the river, the still surface and the fish below.

Monkey turns away too, directing his gaze not down but up, searching the hazy, lifeless sky for a ghost of something familiar.

He knows by now that he won’t find it. The sky is as empty to him as the river is full to Sandy; she hears too much, overwhelmed by the cries and screams of so much life, even as she tries and tries to block it out, while he strains and strains to catch a wisp of his wayward cloud and can’t hear even a whisper.

This new world is a huge, endless-seeming thing. With his powers and his perfect vision weakened from five centuries of sleep, the horizon goes further than he can see; it seems to go forever, and that terrifies him. He is used to being able to see further than the ends of the world, used to being able to fly its length three times over in just a few hours. But here he is, grounded and almost blind, in the company of a god who has lived through more scars than years, and it is all so vast and so huge and so _much_.

He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to fix all that.

He knows it’s his duty, his responsibility. He caused this mess, he created it; everything he sees, everything he hates, all the nightmares that haunt his sleep... it’s all part of his punishment. He’s here, just as Tripitaka keeps telling him, to make things right.

But it is so much, and the god who would be king has never felt so small.

He looks at Sandy, still gazing glassy-eyed into the water. She’s trying to slow her breathing again, going through the motions he taught her last night, without much success.

“I think I’m quite terrible at this,” she says, and her voice is not nearly as lifeless as she’s trying to make it.

It’s not just an observation; it’s a plea as well. Much like physical contact, asking for help is something that comes very hard to her. Not her fault, any more than any of the thousand other things she can’t do; so far as Monkey knows, this may be the first time she’s ever had someone willing to give it.

He’s still not sure if he _is_ willing to give it.

And even if he was, he’s not sure he’s _able_.

He’s not patient or reflective like the Master; he doesn’t understand the secrets of the world or how to bring out the best in the people around him. He doesn’t know how to talk to someone like her at all, much less how to educate her and guide her with the care and diligence she’d need. She’s right about that: he is a terrible teacher.

But still...

“Look,” he starts, very carefully. He feels like he’s navigating a maze set with traps, like one wrong step would bring all kinds of pain crashing down on both of them. “I’m no teacher. I can’t... the stuff you need to learn, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. You understand?”

She doesn’t immediately respond. For a couple of seconds, she stands stock-still, exactly as she was, and he assumes she hasn’t heard him at all. Then, in a surreal sort of delayed reaction, her shoulders suddenly go whipcord-tense, pulling taut the scars criss-crossing their surface, making them stand out devastatingly stark.

“Of course,” she says. “I understand completely.”

The heartbreak in her voice is so thick, so brutal, he almost wishes she’d go back to the dead-star emptiness.

“I can help you with the breathing stuff,” he says. “If you still want me to. And if you think it’ll help, maybe I can try and show you some meditation techniques. But that’s all I’ve got. I only learned how to _do_ this stuff, not how to—” He gestures vaguely, feeling the shame tighten around his lungs, seeing the Master’s face as it was in his nightmare, dark with disappointment. “I’m no Master, okay? I had the chance once, but I screwed that up too, and now I’m just some idiot in a crown who can’t even summon his own stupid cloud. And I can’t... I’m not...”

_I can’t teach you. I can’t even teach myself. And I sure as hell can’t save the world_.

Finally, she turns. Moving slowly, carefully, like it’s an effort to keep her balance, she turns and she faces him, and she makes a noble — if mostly unsuccessful — attempt at actually making eye-contact with him.

“Monkey,” she says.

He doesn’t realise he’s blinking back tears until her face starts to blur and swim, until all those dead stars in her eyes start to tremble like fading sunlight reflected in water. He doesn’t realise he’s choking on them until she steps forward and touches him, a hand covering his chest, as gentle as she can manage while still not in control of her strength. She is trying so hard, so desperately hard, and the contact makes his heart seize up a little inside him, makes his lungs start to burn, his ribs start to split, his—

He coughs.

He can’t see anything. Not her face, not her hollow smile or her empty eyes, not the countless scars skittering across her skin, tangled nightmares, scratched and scrawled and scribbled like the entries in her stupid journal. He can’t see _anything_, and he feels—

The pressure on his chest intensifies.

For a moment, he thinks it’s his heartbeat, his straining lungs, his splitting ribs, but then he blinks his vision halfway clear and he sees that it’s her. She’s trying to ground him, he realises, to offer comfort, but because she still can’t control her strength all she’s really doing is pressing down harder and harder.

He smacks her hand away, gentle but forceful. “You’re doing it again.”

“Oh.” She stares down at her palm, confused, like she thinks it belongs to someone else, then quietly tucks it behind her back, out of the way of them both. “Sorry. I... uh, I still don’t...”

“Yeah, yeah.” Still, the moment brings him back to himself, chases away the tears and the sense of drowning in them, and for that he graces her with a grin, small but sincere. “Thanks.”

She nods, then slinks away, retreating to where her clothes lie discarded under a nearby tree.

“There is too much,” she murmurs; it sounds like she’s speaking to herself, but Monkey has learned by now to tell the difference and he knows she’s not. “Too many things in this world that cause you pain. You can’t fight all of them at once. You can’t throw all of your anger at all the things that hurt you all the time, or there’ll be none left for when you need it.”

Hearing it said it only makes him angrier. Bad enough that it’s true, but it’s a thousand times worse having to hear it from her. Who is she to tell him how much anger he has, how well he can use it? She’s locked hers up so tight it’s practically starved to death.

“I’m not like you,” he growls. “I can’t just turn off my feelings and make myself empty like you do.” He glares at her, though she’s so preoccupied with her clothes she likely doesn’t notice. “All that pain. All those scars and nightmares and who-knows-what else. You’re covered in it, inside and out, and you just don’t care. _Empty_.” The word shudders through him; he shakes his head, trying to dislodge it. “I’m not like that. I could never be like that.”

Sandy holds her cloak up to the light, humming musically as she examines a hole in it. There are so many, Monkey can’t imagine what’s so fascinating about that particular one, but the same is true of almost everything that grabs her attention. Knowing her, she probably thinks it’s a clever metaphor for something.

After a long, heavy silence, she glances up at him and says, “Is that so?”

He frowns. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

“Hm.” She turns back to her cloak, slipping her finger into the hole and tugging until it widens, until the fabric seems almost ready to pull apart completely. “In that case, perhaps I should be the one to teach you.”

Monkey chokes.

The idea sickens him, and for a moment he is horrified beyond words. This new world has already stripped him of so much: his cloud and half his powers, his dignity, his honour, his fellow gods. To say nothing of the loss that brought him here, the pain he still feels in his bones. Everything that ever mattered to him is either gone or mutilated beyond all recognition. He is weakened and grounded, almost nothing next to what he was, and she — _she_, this ragged little wretch of a thing — would have him give up the one thing he still has, the only weapon he knows he can still depend on.

And for what?

To be like _her_.

To be empty and hollow and lost, scarred on the outside and dead on the inside, confused and disjointed and unable to breathe or think or feel. To smile at nothing and forget everything. To—

To wake from a nightmare and not _remember_.

Hm.

Well, maybe that part wouldn’t be so terrible.

He looks around, takes in the rushing river, the silent trees, the distant horizon, so far away now it makes his eyes sting and start to water. Out here on the edge of nowhere, this new world looks so much like the old one. Quiet and peaceful, nothing but the sound of birdsong and Sandy’s laboured breathing; if he kept his eyes closed for long enough, maybe he could pretend it really is the world he knows, the one that Tripitaka’s resistance wants him to bring back. He could take Sandy to the Jade Mountain, he thinks, and bring her to the Master, and he could—

No.

Some things can’t be fixed or changed or undone. Some losses run too deep, some pains burn too hot and too bright to ever burn themselves out. It is an invisible scar, one carved out of his heart, not his skin; it hurts when he breathes too hard or feels too much, making him adjust the way he moves, the way he thinks and feels and looks at the world, the old one in his memory and the new one under his feet.

It’s a scar he doesn’t want to lose.

Maybe Sandy feels that way about some of hers, too.

He never thought to ask. 

He never thought much of anything.

He didn’t want to. Didn’t want to think about who she was, only what he expected, what he wanted. To see her angry, like he would have been, like he _is_. To see her resent this world and all the terrible things it did to her, to face it with bared teeth and clenched fists. She has so much strength in her, but she only ever uses it when she is trying to offer comfort, when she gets carried away and forgets how strong she really is. He doesn’t understand—

No. He _didn’t_ understand.

“This world is a mess,” he says, to her and to himself. “I guess you have to be a bit of a mess yourself, to survive in it.”

Sandy turns. Her cloak falls from her hands, discarded and forgotten, left in the grass as she returns to his side.

He recoils a little when she takes his hands, her movements slow and careful, and brings them up to her neck, her throat. He flinches, tries to pull away, but for once she is in complete control of herself and her strength; she holds fast and does not let him resist, and with the most powerful gentleness he has ever felt she presses the pads of his fingers to the fading, flickering bruises.

Monkey’s breath stalls at the contact. He remembers the darkness of the sewers, her body bent backwards under his, her eyes, wide with fear and pain, seeking Tripitaka’s, her breath strangled by his staff, her chest heaving as she choked and gasped and—

He remembers the Master, too, his final breath so unlike hers, his final words so soft and so much at peace, all the pain and regret bleeding out with his spirit, his life, bleeding out and replaced by warmth and faith and—

Hope.

He opens his eyes, blurry again with tears, and finds Sandy smiling at him. Confused and distant, as always, but familiar now too, the lost-but-knowing smile that says there’s more inside of her than he thinks. Her pulse jumps and twitches under his fingertips: strong and rhythmic, and so alive. Her eyes are glazed and distant, but there is focus there too, and purpose, and—

_Hope_.

Here, too, even in the darkest place he’s ever seen. It is faint and weak, hidden almost entirely behind the ghosts of dead stars and lost memories, but it is there. Pure and perfect and true, and for just a moment he thinks he sees a reflection of the Master too, peaceful and patient and full of forgiveness.

Still smiling, Sandy covers his hands with her own, pressing down gently until he steadies his grip, until he understands, until they’re holding fast together, smothering the bruises, the fading marks of pain and anger, and replacing them with something warm and kind and tender, something almost like— 

“Lesson one,” she says, in a low, reverent whisper. “_Friendship_.”

Monkey nods, slows his breathing, and readies himself to learn.

***


End file.
